LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 
US r»-°7 

Chap. Copyright No. 

Hhel£*S-ML 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL 



AND 



OTHER ESSAYS 



BY 



NORA ARCHIBALD SMITH 

Author of "Under the Cactus Flag," "The Kinder- 
garten in a Nutshell," and "The Children of the 
Future": Joint-Author with Kate Douglas Wiggin 
of " The Republic of Childhood," " The Story Hour," 
and "Children's Rights" 



Kovimt lasst mis unsern Kindern leben 



1900 
MILTON BRADLEY COMPANY 
Springfield, Mass. 

New York Philadelphia \ 1 1 anta San Francisco 



76085 



Library of Congrosa ] 

Two Copies Received 
NOV 15 1900 

SECOND COPY 

Oeiivorod to 
ORDEK DIVISION 

MOV 24 



No 






Copyrighted, 1900. 
By MILTON BRADLEY COMPANY, 

SPRINGFIELD, MASS. 



SPRINGFIELD, MASS. . 

SPRINGFIELD PRINTING AND BINDING COMPANY. 

1900. 



CONTENTS * 

The Message of Froebel, -."'-- 5 

The Spirit of Reverence, - - - 15 

Training the Imagination, - 23 

The Unsocial Child, - -• - 31 

The Children's Guild of Play, - 41 

The Guild of the Brave Poor Things, - 49 

The Social Inclosure of Childhood, - 57 

Dame Nature's Play-School, - - 63 

Shooting Folly as it Flies, - - - 73 
The Personality of the Kindergarten Training Teacher, 85 

Our Nursery Tales : To-day and Yesterday, - - 91 



* Thanks are due to the editors of "The Outlook," "The Nursery," 
"The Kindergarten Review," "Table Talk," and "The Congregational- 
Ist," for permission to reprint the above essays, which have been 
revised and extended for the present volume. 



The Message of Froebel. 

"Koiumt lasst uns unsern Kindern leben." 

In a late number of the Cornhill Magazine a witty 
and forcible writer arrays himself in argument against 
the "message/ 5 which he declares to have been "de- 
livered to the world by Froebel, the great apostle of 
modern theories of education.' 5 

This message, which Froebel adopted from Schiller, 
by the wav. is given by the Cornhill writer as "Come let 
us live for our children;" and by the change of an in- 
significant preposition is thus converted into some- 
thing quite different from its original purpose. 

The thought in its ideal and inclusive form has 
confessedly been taken as the watchword of the kinder- 
garten; it has been painted on banners, embroidered 
on cardboard, illuminated beneath pictures, wrought 
in evergreen, set in stained glass, painted on title- 
pages, used as a text for sermons; but note that the 
motto as it shines and glows in silk and color and gild- 
ing, or looks out upon you from the fair white page 
runs. "Come let us live with our children.** 

To live for them is something we are all loo prone 
to do, in the sense of desiring to bear their burdens, to 
save them grief through the imparting of our own 
experiences; to live with them is another matter, and a 
far more dillicult one. implying on our part, as Dr. 



G TILE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 

Bailmann says, "Sympathy with childhood, adapta- 
bility to children, knowledge and appreciation of child - 
nature"; but it was this that Froebel advocated, and 
upon this ideal that the kindergarten is builded. 

If we consider the Froebelian message as given in 
the article mentioned, we see at once that it makes a 
famous windmill for a modern Don Quixote to tilt 
against. "Let us live for our children," — a saying 
which being interpreted according to Mr. Stephen 
Gwynn, means educating them so that they may live 
for their children, a process which would culminate in 
a world perpetually full of parents sacrificing their 
lives to make their offspring so moral that they in 
their turn would repeat the sacrifice. "And so on, 
ad infinitum" says Mr. Gwynn, though we may assure 
ourselves that this phrase at least is a mistaken one, 
for after a few generations of complete self- forgetf ill- 
ness, self-suppression, and self-effacement all healthy 
instincts would be so crushed out that there would be 
nothing to transmit to descendants and the world 
would come to a sudden stop, like a clock run down. 

Fathers and mothers take themselves too seriously 
nowadays, says our antagonist, and the model Froe- 
belian parent is apt to become a prig and maker 
of prigs and to acquire "a habit of imparting instruc- 
tion which makes him intolerable in all societies. 7 ' 
This amusing statement, if true, might well give 
us pause in our mad career of Froebel ianism, lest we 
end in establishing, as did the father of Maria Edge- 
worth, "an appalling family seminary of all the vir- 



THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. i 

tues where nothing escaped the system of education 
and everything was made subservient to the moral 
discipline of the house." That the gifted Irishwoman 
saved her soul alive in such an atmosphere, however, ( 
and that her creative faculty and sense of humor were 
not chilled in the bud by the deadly seriousness and 
frozen virtue of the household, gives us a ray of hope 
for ourselves and seems to prove that things were not 
after all quite so bad with her as they have been 
painted. 

Let us consider some of the varied objections which 
Mr. Gwynn adduces to the conduct of life according 
to his version of the message of Froebel. He com- 
plains first, as we have noted, that it makes existence 
a perpetual sorry-go-round of self-sacrifice, and. 
second, another point already stated, that it develops 
prigs and prig-makers. A third criticism advanced, 
is against the folly of attempting to bring unconscious 
moral influence to bear upon the child according to 
the suggestions of the great German educator. The re- 
sult of this mistaken procedure would be, as the critic 
ingenuously intimates, that the child would early find 
out the all-too-virtuous intentions of his progenitors 
and would either knowingly submit to them and thus 
diminish his own individuality, or rebel openly and al- 
together against the directing force. 

In the one case we foresee, to give our enemy's 
theory logical development, that the small sufferer 
would become the Little Arthur of the Sunday school 
l )00 k s _the kind of child that sends all his pocket 



8 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 

money to the heathen; and in the other, that lie would 
become an infant Ishmael, saying, with his red right 
hand raised against every man, "I will not he good 
and no one shall make me !" 

Another diverting objection alleged to living for 
our children is that we shall thus he ".-ending them 
out into life equipped with a terribly undue sense of 
their own importance" ; and still another, and this 
directed especially against the kindergarten, that "it 
does not enforce the lesson of personal effort and 
that in laving itself out to make things pleasant for 
the learner it does not make sufficient demand upon 
attention, nor call for exercise of will." 

It is quite true, as a New England woman said of a 
loquacious neighbor, that "you can't talk all day 
"thout savin' somethin" once in a while," and there 
are several things in this undeniably interesting arti- 
cle that have a keen edge of truth and others that at 
least require consideration. 

The arguments lor the most part are scarcely of 
a kind that can be answered, for they spring from a 
misunderstanding of this so-called message of Froe- 
bel. It does not call upon us for complete self-sacrifice 
for our children's sake, and, if it did do so, our own 
healthy instincts could certainly he trusted to keep 
us from a morbid desire to live altogether for others, 
while we trust that our native modi sty would prevent 
most of us from acquiring the fatal habit deplored by 
the Cornhill writer, of imparting instruction in all 
societies. 



THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 9 

As to ihf matter of unconscious influence, no disci- 
ple of Froebel but would agree with Mr. Gwynn thai 

parents who constantly shaped their conduct and con- 
versation for the particular end of the child's moral 
advantage Mould he, as Dogberry said, "most tolerable 
and not to he endured." The silent spiritual influence 
of which Froebel speaks, and upon which all other great 
religious teachers are eloquent, can never be directly 
applied; it is unconsciously given, unconsciously re- 
ceived; it is a breath from depths of being far below 
tlie surface waters of self-knowledge, and we cannot 
prophesy whence it cometh nor whither it goeth. 

It is both true and wise to say that character and 
health are often best promoted by judicious letting 
alone, though we votaries of the kindergarten had 
thought in our blindness that we, of all people, least 
needed to be adjured to ask a little less of education 
and trust a little more to nature. 

The truth is that if our clever adversary thoroughly 
understood the message of Froebel he would probably 
be in hearty sympathy with it. He has doubtless been 
talking over the kindergarten with youthful senti- 
mentalists, with fanatics who claim impossibilities for 
the Froebel i an theories, with foggy-brained enthu- 
siasts who have mastered the letter of the law but 
have never understood its spirit, — and if England 
has produced as many of these three classes of persons 
as the fertile soil of America has grown, his oppor- 
tunities for conversation have been extended, if net 
valuable. 



10 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 

We believe, for our part, simply and seriously, 
and we think sensibly, that this message of Froebel 
is a divinely-inspired message and that it is one of 
the texts of a new gospel which will regenerate hu- 
manity through education. We believe that the in- 
sight into baby life, into infantile needs, desires and 
aspirations which living with them imparts, gave to 
Froebel, and has since given to those of his followers 
who have adopted his methods of study, a peculiar 
power in dealing with children. 

We think that the often-quoted tenement-house 
mother of Chicago had for a moment the vision of a 
seer and almost the diction of one, when she said 
one day to her boy's teacher, "I know why Dinny*< 
allers so good with you — the kindergarten jist matches 
him with his work." 

It is to this, we think, incontrovertible fact that 
it does match the child, that it provides him with 
environment as suitable for his needs as water to the 
fish or air to the bird, that it develops him so thorough- 
ly and so harmoniously, and to. the further fact that 
it matches child-nature in general is due the marked 
influence that it has already exerted upon later educa- 
tion. 

Even those who find much to criticise in its meth- 
ods are bounteous in praise of the spirit of the work 
and of the marvelous way in which that spirit has 
begun to permeate all education, to stir beneath dry 
places and to wake new thoughts into life. 

To begin with small things and proceed to those 



THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 11 

which are more important, from its peculiar methods 
of "playing with brightness" has come all the color- 
work now so admirably handled in the primary 
schools. 

Drawing also, modeling in clay, nature study, 
though all these were used to some -extent before the 
advent of the kindergarten, have yet received from 
it so great an impetus and been directed thereby into 
channels so novel that they may almost be said to-day 
to be new branches of instruction. 

Country excursions and the planting of school-gar- 
dens, — direct outgrowths of kindergarten practice; 
vacation-schools and public playgrounds, fruit of Froe- 
beFs conviction that happy and purposeful activity 
is essential to childhood, — these testify in all our 
great cities to the strength and value of this so-called 
'"mud-pie theory of education." 

Uno Cygmeus, the deviser of the Slojd system, 
confesses that to Froebel he owes the seed-thought of 
his work, the paidologists call him the father of child- 
study, and the advocates of manual training go so far 
as to state that the kindergarten is the most perfect 
"all-round" school of industry in the world. 

When we reflect, moreover, upon the great number 
of kindergarten normal classes established in the last 
twenty years, upon the companies of enthusiastic, de- 
voted young girls who annually graduate from them, 
upon the mothers' meetings carried on by the directors 
of all free kindergartens, upon the coteries of educated 
women who are studying Froebelian theories on a more 



V2 THE MESSAGE OE FROEBEL. 

advanced plane, and upon the parents' associations, 
affiliated with these, in which fathers are studying chil- 
dren's ways, we begin to have an idea of the power 
of the movement as a whole, and of the value of 
Froebel's message: "Come let us live with our chil- 
dren." 

Nor are we willing to agree with Mr. Stephen 
Gwynn, whose opinions, already so often quoted, are 
decidedly stimulating to warfare, that the adoption of 
these theories has an ironical result, that the modern 
mother is so profoundly convinced that this business 
of education is a difficult and a subtle one that she 
packs her children out of the house as soon as they 
can walk and salves her conscience by paying the bills. 
It may indeed be that the modern mother has "learned 
that the early training of a human creature should 
be intrusted to a person who has minutely studied 
the mental processes of children and understood the 
harmoniously proportionate development of body and 
mind," but the committing to memory of this stilted 
phraseology could hardly lessen her own sense of re- 
sponsibility, nor avert from her mind the conviction 
that the truth is as applicable to her as to the teacher. 

\<>, while the message of Froebel, as exemplified in 
the kindergarten, is considered, by some of the highest 
authorities in these matters, as the greatest educational 
force of the age, it behooves all persons intrusted with 
the care of children to gain some knowledge of its 
basic principles and of the methods which it uses 
to carry them out. Let it be remembered at the out- 



THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 13 

set, to give a wide outlook upon the matter, that it is 
a system of child training which has nothing to do 
with class, race, condition or country. It has too 
often been considered as a charity and not sufficiently 
valued as a means of education, and there has been 
great lack of appreciation of the fact that, as some- 
body has wisely said, while it is a desirable privilege 
for the children of the poor, it is a vital necessity for 
the children of the rich. 

Let it be remembered too, in spite of all criticism, 
that so much as the child-garden has done as an 
influence in shaping later education, in modifying 
the work of school, seminary, college and university, 
so much it may do for the baby in every nursery, for 
Froebel's view of child culture was that it should begin 
at birth, in the sub-conscious period of existence. 

He considers the infant in the cradle and provides 
numerous plays by which his dawning intelligence may 
be addressed, though this training is to be of a follow- 
ing kind and is never to interfere with Nature's proc- 
esses and her slow and gradual unfolding. 

Even should the mother never make use of one of 
the kindergarten technicalities, she would, by study- 
ing the writings of Froebel, gain a reverence for the 
personality of the child and an insight into the three- 
fold relations of her little one to man, to nature, and 
to God, which would not only make her a better 
mother, but a better, truer woman. 



THE SPIRIT OF REVERENCE. 

"Man does not willingly submit himself to reverence; 
or rather, he never so submits himself: it is a higher sense, 
which must be communicated to his nature; which only, 
in some peculiarly favored individuals, unfolds itself spon- 
taneously, who on this account, too, have of old been 
looked upon as saints and gods. Here lies the worth, here 
lies the business of all true religions." 

— Goethe. 

If there be any basis of truth in the popular 
sentiment which affixes labels to the various nations 
of the earth, stamping one as light and frivolous, an- 
other as slow of understanding and stiff-necked, an- 
other still as treacherous and vindictive, then do we 
Americans stand accused at the world's bar, of the 
high crime of irreverence. How well founded is the 
accusation each one of us may judge for himself, 
though we may maintain with much show of reason 
that our national fault, if indeed it be ours, is of the 
Lips and not of the heart and is merely a light and 
jesting way of looking at things produced and fostered 
by the youth and gayety and prosperity of our country. 
We are young and strongs free and rich, — it is more 
than a generation since any widespread national 
calamity befell us, what wonder then if -we look at 
the world through rose-colored spectacles and sec each 
other's faces broad with smiles as in a convex mirror? 
May not this so-called irreverence, too, be in some 



16 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 

sense a matter of climate? In the posthumous diary, 
lately published, of a gifted 'American girl, she says 
with keen insight, "How wonderful it is that we 
should have all the sunshine in our land ! No wonder 
that we are cheerful, and that we are always half in 
jest. God said we might be." 

We may consider perhaps that we have divine 
warrant for an optimistic, joyous spirit, for lightness 
of heart and some consequent lightness of speech, 
but we must beware lest this lead us too far. If we 
are in truth irreverent as a people, irreverent of heart 
and in the real sense of the word, then we are lacking 
in the one thing upon which, in the opinion of the 
world's greatest philosophers, "all depends for making 
man in every point a man." 

Goethe, in "Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and 
Travels/' leads his hero to the "Pedagogic Province" 
where his son is to be educated, and hardly has he 
crossed the borders of that fair land when he is struck 
with the three different attitudes and expressions as- 
sumed by the companies of children he meets as their 
leaders and teachers pass by. The youngest cross their 
hands upon their breasts and look joyfully toward 
heaven; the next in age fold their arms behind their 
backs and turn upon the earth a smiling look, while 
the oldest, with frank and spiritual air, their hands 
by their sides, turn their heads toward their comrades 
and form themselves into a line, — the younger chil- 
dren, be it understood, always standing separate. 

These three kinds of gesture are interpreted to 



THE SPIRIT OF REVERENCE. 17 

Wilhelm as symbolic of the three reverences which it 
is the object of education to foster. The first is 
reverence to a God above who images and reveals him- 
self in parents, teachers, and superiors; the second is 
reverence for the earth and all that lives upon it, 
for its bounty, its laws, and the joys and sorrows that 
it gives us. 

When the lessons indicated by the first two pos- 
tures have been mastered the pupil is freed from them 
and assuming the third attitude learns reverence to 
man. Turning to his fellows, he ranges himself with 
them and stands ready to give and take, to love and 
admire, to help and be helped and in combination with 
his equals to face the world. 

From these reverences, says Goethe, springs the 
highest reverence, — reverence for one's self, — and the 
severest punishment ever inflicted upon pupils in the 
"Pedagogic Province" is to be declared unworthy to 
show forth any phase of the virtue which all influences 
are conspiring to teach. 

It is Goethe's opinion that well-formed healthy 
human beings bring much into the world with them, 
but that no child brings reverence. It is a higher 
sense, he says, which must be communicated, and in 
the communication lies the business not only of educa- 
tion bat of all true religions. 

If it is the general agreement that American chil- 
dren, and consequently adults, are peculiarly lacking 
in this virtue, then we must cast about for methods 
by which it may be imparted, for the soul without it 



18 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 

is but a parched country lacking the gentle dew, which, 
nightly falling, refreshes every tender bud of good- 
ness. 

Taking up the first reverence, may we not question 
whether the religious education of our little ones is all 
that it might be. Ts their Sunday school really a 
place of spiritual influences where some simple lesson 
is learned, some delicate impression made each week? 
Is the "grace before meat"' they daily hear, a clearly- 
repeated, heartfelt invocation varied occasionally to 
suit varying circumstances and looked for and re- 
membered because so varied? Are the family prayers, 
whether of daily or weekly occurrence, so planned 
as to interest even the youngest auditors? Do we 
speak of religious things with respect in the children's 
presence, or are we, to quote Goethe again, "indiffer- 
ent towards God, contemptuous towards the world, 
spiteful towards equals 7 '? 

Is church-going a matter of importance, of real 
meaning with us, an occasion looked forward to so 
gladly that the child counts it a high festival when he 
also is occasionally allowed to attend the services? 
It is true that he may understand very few of the 
songs that are sung and perhaps none of the words 
that are spoken, but these matters will by no means 
affect his deep impression of the reverent spirit 
breathed through the sacred place, of the common 
aspiration that binds together the many hearts thai 
beat about him. 

And lastly, is the child's own prayer at night faith- 



THE SPIRIT OF REVERENCE. 19 

fully heard and with reverent leisure? The rhymed 
or metrical petitions which we teach our children are 
commonly poor things enough and could we not trust 
the Lord to know what we mean to impart by them, 
as well as to spread his influence above and through 
and beyond ours, our charges would often gain little 
by their infantile devotions. 

The nightly blessing, when the little one is tucked 
away in bed, is something seldom heard perhaps and 
yet there is no simple ceremony more devout and more 
impressive. There is a child of yesterday who well 
remembers the touch of a cool, soft hand upon her 
forehead every evening in the dusk and a gentle voice 
that said as she was wafted into dreamland, "The Lord 
bless thee and keep thee : the Lord shine upon thee 
and be gracious unto thee : the Lord lift up his coun- 
tenance upon thee and give thee peace/' A child so 
blessed sleeps consciously under the shadow of the 
everlasting wings and the soul thus early is drawn into 
communion with the highest. 

As to the second reverence, that gained by com- 
munion with Xature and comprehension of her varied 
language, we frequently entirely fail to appreciate its 
importance or to provide means by which it may be 
learned. Froebel, whose eyes the Lord had touched 
that he might see into the heart of the child, tells us 
that the restless baby may often be quieted at night if 
he is taken to the window and allowed to look out upon 
the tranquil moon as she sails serenely through the 
blue, and the great teacher writes a song to illustrate 



20 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 

the fact, showing us how we may "make the moon's 
attraction a point of departure for the development of 
that spiritual attraction of which it is but the vanish- 
ing symbol." 

It is not only the moon and the sun and the stars 
and all celestial phenomena that naturally lead the 
child to contemplation and wonder, but the life of 
plants and of animals, the wonderful crystals of the 
rocks, the exquisite convolutions of the shells, the 
delicate fronds of the sea-moss, the deep golden heart 
of the flowers, — he is so made that instinctively he 
loves and admires all these and he cannot look upon 
them and study them without an irresistible movement 
of his soul toward their Maker and his own. Nature 
study is as essentially religious as the instruction 
which we are accustomed to think of under that head, 
and in many cases perhaps it is even more truly so, 
for we cannot interfere with it so much, we cannot 
dim the bright page so sadly by the overhanging 
shadow of our own personality. The Great Artificer 
and that which He has made teach the lesson together 
and we have but to provide the right atmosphere for 
the lesson. 

x\nd what may we do to teach the third reverence ? 
In the first place let us supply the child with definite 
ideals which he may admire. Hero-worship is but an- 
other name for reverence, and the tides of the soul ever 
need a moon to draw them upward to the flood. In 
history, ancient and modern, in romance and ballad 
and legend, we have unlimited treasures at our com- 



THE SPIRIT OF REVERENCE. 21 

mancl and if the story-teller's art be ours we need no 
other magic to create wonder and reverence in the 
youthful heart, ^ot only must we search the stores 
of the past, but, lest the child think the giants are 
all dead, let us hold up to his admiration the men and 
women of to-day in his own village and township and 
state and country, those who are now and here living 
noble lives and doing noble deeds. Let us strive, too, 
never to destroy youthful enthusiasms, if reasonably 
well-founded, by unduly sharp criticism given from 
the standpoint of the adult. Reverence is a virtue 
which, like any other, grows by exercise, and the 
ideal toward which first it climbs must needs be nearer 
the earth than the point to which it last aspires. 

Let us too, as parents and guardians, strive ever 
to maintain a just and firm government in our various 
domains, lest the child, seeing how easily 'our rule is 
set at naught, learn to scorn those who are set in 
authority over him and from despising earthly laws 
and law-givers begin to scoff at those which are 
heavenly. 

And what is the conclusion of the whole matter? 
It is that the pure flame of reverence must glow in 
our own spirits before we can hope to light it on 
another's altars. Our pessimism, our bitterness, our 
hopelessness, our contempt and carelessness for those 
things which are high and holy will breathe out like 
noxious vapors, do what we may to suppress them, and 
will suffocate the first feeble flames of reverence as 
they kindle in the soul of the child. 



TRAINING THE IMAGINATION. 

" For, sec, he soared 

By means of that mere snatch to many a hoard 
Of fancies ; as some falling cone bears soft 
The eye, along the fir-tree spire, aloft 
To a dove's nest." 

— Robert Browning. 

The question whether education should devote it- 
self to cultivating faculties already strong, or to wak- 
ing those which lie dormant, in order to develop the 
mind upon all sides, is one about which there is 
wide difference of opinion, and concerning which many 
fierce battles of argument have been fought. If the 
child is "born short" in any line, say the warriors 
of the one party, no amount of training can supply 
what Dame Nature has withheld: why not, therefore, 
expend your energies in cultivating the powers which 
have been given in fullest measure? 

Such an adage as Poela nasciiur, non fit, has a 
broad reach, it must be confessed ; and many of us, 
after a despairing day in the schoolroom, spent in 
hammering at the door of an absent faculty, are 
ready to take it as a life motto, and to protest that 
the cultivation of natural aptitudes is the only fit 
task of the educator. 

But here comes the party of the other part, which 
has been breathlessly waiting its chance to argue, and 
declares that harmonious development should be the 



24 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 

object of ideal education, and that every faculty of 
the child must be so dealt with that it may have an 
opportunity of growth, should the life-germ prove to 
lie within it. This seems a sensible argument also, 
and we can but wonder where, between such opposite 
views, the real truth may be said to lie. 

It seems to be clear, however, that, though special- 
ists are the order of the day, and though we incline 
more and more every year to the opinion that the 
full development of individuality is the goal to be 
reached in education, yet an infant specialist is an 
abnormal creature, and the object of early training, 
at least, should be to make an "all-round child." 

These varied thoughts were suggested by the remark 
of a small boy which was published among child-say- 
ings the other day. "Mother," said the infant skeptic 
in the midst of a fairy story, "I really don't want to 
hear any more of that stuff; I don't believe a word 
of it." 

It is difficult to decide just what remedies to apply 
in such a case as this, unless we know something of 
the attendant symptoms, or can learn enough of the 
patient to discover the probable cause of the malady. 
It may, indeed, be no malady at all, but an inherited 
defect, like deafness or dipsomania; but certainly 
some attempt should be made to cure it, should it 
threaten to become permanent. There is a possibility, 
of course, that it may be only a phase of development, 
for Sully points out in his "Studies of Childhood" 
that most children are at once matter-of-fact observers 



TRAINING THE IMAGINATION. 25 

and dreamers, passing from the one to the other as the 
mood takes them; and that the prodigal output of 
fancy, the reveling in myth and story, is often charac- 
teristic of one period of childhood only. 

"The wee mite of three and a half," he says, 
"spending more than half his days in trying to realize 
all manner of pretty, odd, startling fancies about ani- 
mals, fairies, and the rest, is something vastly unlike 
the boy of six or seven, whose mind is now bent 
on understanding the make and go of machines, and of 
that big machine, the world." 

Should the skepticism of our small child then, be 
only a passing mood, we can look upon it with com- 
parative indifference, assuring ourselves that human 
growth is not always and uniformly loyely at every 
stage. Assuming, for the moment, that the trouble we 
are considering is only skin-deep, we may find various 
reasons for it without much difficulty. 

Who knows but that the boy may have been re- 
peating in a parrot-like way some remark he had 
heard made on a different topic, fully cognizant, as 
children often are, that it would serve to adorn him, 
for a time, with a peacock tail of notoriety? 

Who knows but that the mother may have been 
reading him one of the clumsy modern fairy tales, 
finally shown by the author to have been only a sham, 
or the product of mince pie, from which the child's 
fancy rightly revolted as from a sin against the spirit ? 

There is a chance, however, that the matter may 
be a much more serious one, and in that case we must 



26 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 

ask ourselves what is to be done for the mending of 
it. 

If any one sweeping assertion in regard to chil- 
dren is more often made than another, it is, perhaps, 
that they are full of fancy; and yet there is plenty 
of evidence that nature makes now and then a decid- 
edly matter-of-fact and unimaginative specimen, as if 
to vary the pattern. Let not the parents of our 
little infidel, then, despairingly persuade themselves 
that theirs is a difficulty never encountered before, for 
every one who has seen much of children knows that 
such a white blackbird is now and then to be found 
among them. Xor let them, on the other hand, pride 
themselves on the unusual quality of the mind of 
their offspring, believing that it will develop into good 
hard common sense by and by. Such mental bent as 
it does indicate" will, on the contrary, if not modified 
by education, be the greatest of misfortunes, for he 
who is absolutely destitute of imagination can have no 
charity, no sympathy, no creative ability, no ideality, 
no reverence, and no true love. 

Yet we need not conclude that because the child 
does not care for myths and fairy tales he is therefore 
utterly lacking in imagination. Mr. Kuskin has told 
us in "Prseterita" that, when a boy, he was incapable 
of acting a part or telling a tale, and that he never 
knew a child "whose thirst for visible fact was at 
once so eager and so methodic." The imagination was 
there in this case in superabundant measure, but was 
not yet in working order, for the whole mind was 



TRAINING THE IMAGINATION. 27 

absorbed in other things, and doubtless more than 
all else in the study of Nature and her manifestations. 

The imagination, too, may early be directed to 
science, and the child show inexhaustible interest in 
machines and their working, in rocks or stars or 
flowers or animals or atmospheric forces. Such a 
child would obviously be a bright and thoughtful one, 
and would give such clear indications of his natural 
bent as to make his future equally clear. 

But is there a little one who shows no keen inter- 
est in any of these things, and who does not care for 
talcs of fancy, it will probably also be noted that his 
powers in play are somewhat below the average, and 
that he docs not invent for himself any of those 
charming nursery dramas in which the youthful actor 
is sometimes so absorbed as apparently to lose his 
own identity. Must we therefore conclude that he is 
a dullard? It may be so, or it may be that he is 
merely undeveloped. If the former hypothesis seem 
correct, let us delay to write him down an ass until we 
assure ourselves that his physical condition is normal. 
We can hardly expect a child who cannot hear the 
tick of a watch a foot from his ear to be prompt in 
response to verbal suggestion: we can hope for little 
mental brilliancy from a small creature so afflicted 
with adenoid growths, for instance, that the act of 
breathing takes all his strength; and the faculty of 
imagination, which depends for its power on rapid, 
frequent, and clear perceptions, cannot be supposed 
to have a fighting chance to live in a small bein^ 



28 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 

whose eyesight has never permitted him to see things 
as the}' are. All these millstones not only may hang 
about the neck of a so-called dull child, but have hung 
there in numbers of well-known cases, and yet no one 
has seen them till their weight had utterly distorted 
the growing intelligence. 

But, say the subject of our discussion is in good 
physical condition and yet is heavy and stolid and 
devoid of fancy, what then shall we do? If we think 
of imagination in its supremest meaning, as the crea- 
tive faculty of the poet or the artist, it passes, so says 
Alexander Bain, "entirely out of the reach of express 
training, and is excluded from schemes of education 
as too high for the school." 

Yet if, as already said, it is dependent upon knowl- 
edge received from the outward world through the 
perceptions, and is a rearranging or creative power, 
there are many ways in which it may be developed. 

Perhaps, though the child has been looking all his 
life, he has never really seen anything for want of 
some one who could direct his vision; perhaps the 
one thing of all others which would really wake 
him up has not yet come within his ken; perhaps, 
being naturally slow of perception, he has never met 
anyone who could vivify for him the objects of the 
outside world, interpreting the thing seen to the dor- 
mant intelligence. 

All these hindrances to the growth of fancy may 
be removed by dint of effort, and we may at least 
supply the child in babyhood with something which 



TRAINING THE IMAGINATION. 29 

will interest him. with playthings which he can re- 
arrange and combine according to his will, with ob- 
jects which give him genuine delight, and thus, by 
force of occupying himself with what is small and 
near at hand and concrete, lie may by and by gain the 
power of reaching out to that which is beyond. 

If he has no love of fairy stories, time is worse 
than wasted in reading or telling them to him. Why 
not substitute the wonder tales of science, whose truth 
can be demonstrated to any little doubting Thomas? 
" After nil." as Lowell said, "there is as much poetry 
in the iron horses that eat fire as in those of Diomed 
that fed on men. If you cut an apple across, you 
may trace in it the lines of the blossom that the bee 
hummed around in May ; and so the soul of poetry 
survives in things prosaic." 

Some kind of literature the young human crea- 
ture must have ; and if it be neither myth, fairy lore, 
nor science stories, we may try hero tales when he is 
older, and read him sounding ballads that must stir the 
blood of any young thing that loves by nature, strife 
and pursuit and conquest, the ring of steel, the clash 
of armor, and the shouts of battle. 

Dickens has etched for us in "Hard Times" a pic- 
ture of child-training which deliberately excludes all 
appeals to the imagination; and we know the fate of 
that unfortunate little Gradgrind who was so often 
bidden never to wonder. Even a McChoakumchild, 
we might suppose, should know that wonder is an 
essential element in human development, that it 



30 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 

stretches the mind and sets all the faculties on tiptoe 
striving to catch the bright visions that float just out 
of reach. Let us reverse the Gradgrind motto for our 
children, and insist that they cultivate the imaginative 
powers, for it was a great lover of their kind who 
said that childish wonder was the first step in human 
wisdom. 



THE UNSOCIAL CHILD. 

"And so there is not any matter, nor any spirit, nor 
any creature, but it is capable of a unity of some kind with 
other creatures, and in that unity is its perfection and 
theirs, and a pleasure also for the beholding of all other 
creatures that can behold." 

— John Ruskin. 



Since the majority of children conform with more 
or less exactness to a certain standard, it would appear 
nnprofi table, perhaps, to devote much time to a con- 
sideration of the exceptions ; and yet, to a mother who 
has an ugly duckling in her own family, he seems 
of far more importance than the whole flock of her 
neighbor's swans. 

One might be tempted, if one were asked by such a 
parent how to train the social instincts of the young, 
for instance, to reply hastily that the question was 
ah automatic, self-answering one, for that children 
bring children is a proverb known in every land. And 
yet the exception has as much right to be considered 
as the normal case; and now and then in families of 
every grade of society we find a little one who seems 
to prefer his own society to that of others. He cares 
to mingle, apparently, neither with his brothers and 
sisters, nor with visitors, and it is often a difficult 
matter to discover the cause of this peculiarity and 
find its remedy, if indeed we see fit to apply one. 



32 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 

It must be conceded to be a peculiarity, of course, 
and the child that shows it is exceptional in one way 
or another ; for by nature life seeks life, and youth 
yearns after youth. It is only necessary to notice 
the riotous behavior of a puppy when he has another 
of his kind to roll and tumble about with, or to watch 
twin Lambs sporting in a meadow, and contrast these 
things with their demeanor when alone, to know that 
companionship is needful and delightful to all young 
creatures. 

For what reasons, then, would a child voluntarily 
withdraw himself from his fellows and prefer to occupy 
himself alone? 

In the first place, there might be a very simple and 
obvious cause which would make the separation not 
his fault but his misfortune — that of ill health. A 
child may be neither a cripple nor an invalid and yet 
be so far below par in strength and energy that the 
society of ruddy, boisterous, reckless, romping urchins 
of his own age may be a positive weariness to him. He 
is not to blame for this; indeed, older people can well 
sympathize with him and can remember certain times 
when the aggressive strength and spirits of lively, un- 
tiring, effervescent, high-keyed friends have been evils 
not to be borne. 

If the little one is in good health and yet is solitary 
in his habits, it may be that he is too advanced in mind 
to care for the companionship of children of his own 
age, just as a grown cat looks down with dignified 
scorn upon the trivial gambols of a kitten. Perhaps ho 



THE UNSOCIAL CHILD. 33 

would get on extremely well with older playmates and 
a more elaborate system of games, while he finds those 
offered to him by circumstances not in the least worth 
while. 

It may be, too, that he is of a thoughtful, fanciful 
temperament and is absorbed in the society of dream- 
companions tenfold more real to him than the people 
of the outside world. In many cases a solitary child, 
or one who is exceptionally imaginative, evolves for 
himself an "invisible playmate" who becomes as dear 
as a real one, to whom he gives a name, who shares all 
his sports and nestles by his side at night. Sometimes 
such a figure of fantasy, never more than half believed 
in and yet the dearer for the doubt, persists in the 
mind for years, serving all purposes of companionship 
to the little dreamer. 

Xow and then, too, an exceptionally bright child, 
active of mind, quick of perception, fertile in expedi- 
ents, is surrounded by unkind fate with little dullards 
who can neither originate anything themselves nor 
carry out properly the details of a game intrusted to 
them. The fiery spirit endures their company as long 
as it well can and then breaks impatiently away, pre- 
ferring solitude to the crushing weight of such stu- 
pidity. There are plenty of stolid, unimaginative chil- 
dren who, having no adequate views about play as a 
really important and engrossing business, are quite 
willing to go through the same stereotyped games day 
after day, and their society is doubtless quite as tire- 



34- THE MESSAGE OE FROEBEL. 

some to a bright child as that of a grown-up bore may 
be to us. 

Sometimes, again, a baby comes into the world 
with the birthmark of genius on his brow, and is 
constrained by the very conditions of his nature to go 
through the world to some extent a solitary. Sully 
says, in his "Studies of Childhood/' speaking of the 
unusual and original child, "It will possibly be found 
that, although not a romping, riotous player, nor, in- 
deed, much disposed to join other children in their 
pastimes, the original child has his own distinctive 
style of play, which marks him out as having more 
than other children of that impulse to dream of far-off 
things, and to bring them near in the illusion of 
outer semblance, which enters more or less distinctly 
into all art." 

If you have never seen one of these strange, gifted 
children, you may find a touching sketch of one in 
"Missy," the heroine of Charlotte Bronte's "Villette," 
and another, done from life by George Sand of herself, 
in her "Histoire d'une Vie." 

With the thoughts .and dreams ana fancies, the 
wonderful solitary plays, of such a gifted human crea- 
ture, who would presume to meddle? Who would 
force the society of a rosy little earthly mortal on one 
whose spirit-wings have already budded? 

If the want of sociability in our ugly duckling is 
due to any of the foregoing causes, we have no reason 
to be anxious, but may rather joyfully look forward to 
the snowy whiteness of plumage the swan will put 



THE UNSOCIAL CHILD. do 

on by and by; but, unfortunately, there is another side 
to the picture, and ugly ducklings have been known 
before now to grow up into still uglier ducks and 
drakes. 

The unsocial child may be a selfish and a miserly 
one, who cannot endure that any hands but his own 
shall touch his cherished toys, and would rather doom 
himself to complete isolation than have his treasures 
meddled with. 

He may also be a youthful tyrant, and betake him- 
self to sulk in a corner if he cannot order every detail 
of the game. Unless he chances upon very gentle and 
timid companions, he must of necessity be unsocial, 
for, no matter how much he wants to play, he can find 
few who are willing to play with him. 

There is still another unsocial child sometimes 
(and we must touch very tenderly upon his peculiari- 
ties), who, from either physical or mental defect, is not 
quite as other children; and, worse than this (or is 
it better — who can say?), he realizes the fact. He 
knows that he does not hear as soon, does not under- 
stand as quickly, cannot carry out ideas as rapidly, as 
the rest; he is always stumbling along heavy-footed 
after them, not quite able to "catch up," and is often 
the butt of their thoughtless gibes. Who can wonder 
if by and by he steals away from his playmates now 
and then, or at last isolates himself entirely, shut in 
with the self that is so sore a burden. 

Yet such an unfortunate, and all the other little 
erring mortals we have touched upon, are in most 



36 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 

dire need of the society they seem anxious to reject. 
The dreamy, fanciful child would be the better* now 
and then for the company of" a good, prosaic, ordinary 
little mortal, such as he will meet and perhaps be 
housed with all along life's journey; the exceptionally 
bright child needs to come in contact with those 
equally gifted, and even more gifted than he, that he 
may more justly estimate his own qualities ; the selfish 
child must learn through love to give up to others; 
the tyrant must find out early in life that he cannot 
always rule, and that disaster will come if he attempts 
to do so ; and the small sufferer who is not quite normal 
will make wonderful improvement if he can mingle 
with companions of his own age who will be kind and 
gentle and considerate and allow him to forget his 
defects now and then. 

A child who is determinately unsocial can some- 
times be led to break the outer shell at least of his 
reserve and shyness — for the trouble sometimes lies in 
these defects also — through the company of pet ani- 
mals. If he is given whatever living things his 
heart most longs for, whether rabbits or pigeons or 
guinea-pigs or white mice or kittens or canaries or 
puppies; if they are understood to be his own and 
he is taught what they need in the way of care and 
food and shelter; if he is made entirely responsible 
for their welfare, the new duties and interests will 
often take him quite out of himself. He will be busy, 
happy, and absorbed ; he will learn to forget himself 
somewhat in the needs of others, and that is the first 



THE UNSOCIAL CHILD. 37 

essential of living; and he will have no time to think 
of "the immense me who has blocked the way to his 
knowing his companions. He will meet another child 
in community of distress over the ailments of a pet 
rat, when he would be consumed with shyness if there 
were no subject of mutual interest, and thus he learns 
unconsciously how to get on with his fellows. 

Akin to this resource which may be given to an 
unsocial child is the persuading him to take up some 
interesting and suitable occupation. If he be of a 
scientific turn, cultivate his taste for collecting plants 
or stones or shells; if he has a mechanical bias, give 
him a turning-lathe or a printing-press; if he is artis- 
tic, let him study wood-carving, drawing, or clay 
modeling: it does not matter which one of these things 
he takes up, so long as it interests him; but let him 
do something which will employ physical as well as 
mental activity, that so he may be delivered from 
moping and brooding. 

It is essential that this want of sociability should 
be cured in children if it comes from any such defects 
as have been described, and the cure must begin early 
or it will be altogether useless. Let us study the 
reasons for the peculiarity evinced by the special child 
in question, and then see what may be done to remove 
them. The trouble may be only a temporary one. 
Perhaps the little one has been too much with older 
people and is embarrassed at first with those of his 
own age; perhaps he is morbidly self-conscious, and 
perhaps he is not well. Let us study to provide suit- 



38 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 

able companions for him, suitable in age, in tastes r 
and in temperament, remembering that his whole 
future destiny may possibly be colored by this small 
sunbonneted maiden or this lad in brief trousers 
whom we bring to his side. And let us beware of 
setting him down in a throng of children and ex- 
pecting him to gambol at once. Do you remember, 
in that piece of child-study, "Great Expectations/' 
how Miss Havisham took the frightened Pip by the 
shoulder and fiercely said, "Play, boy, play ! Why 
don't you play?" 

Such an admonition naturally chills the blood like 
sitting down to a dinner shadowed by the hostess's, 
prayer that you will be brilliant. 

There is one last remark to be made in this paper, 
if the writer may be forgiven in advance for a consti- 
tutional tendency to dwell upon it, an idea that be- 
longs here by mental and spiritual right, and if we 
are to do the subject justice it must be introduced. 

If you have a child who shows a tendency to alien- 
ate himself from his fellows, who has never learned 
how to combine his plays and occupations with others, 
and is thus not only missing all the benefits of fellow- 
ship and communion, but is setting himself altogether 
wrong for the practical business of living, then I do 
believe, and therefore I must speak, that if such a 
child were early sent to a good kindergarten these evils 
would be corrected in the bud. If anything can be 
recommended as a cure for selfishness, tyrannical 
spirit, morbidity, shyness, listlessness, and too great 



THE UNSOCIAL CHILD. 39 

precocity in a little child; if anything will prove a 
help to sluggishness and inertness of mind, it is the 
kindergarten atmosphere, the Froebelian theories car- 
ried out in work and play and everyday religion, 
under an earnest, intelligent, spiritual-minded woman, 
who not only understands the principles she is inter- 
preting, but the living, breathing, faulty, wonderful, 
human creatures under her care. 



THE CHILDEEN'S GUILD OF PLAY. 

"A great historian many centuries ago wrote it down 
that the first things conquered in battle are the eyes; the 
soldier flees from what he sees before. But so often in 
the world's fight we are defeated by what we look back 
upon; we are whipped in the end by the things we saw in 
the beginning of life." 

— James Lane Allen. 

Life is so dreary in the slums ; poverty so crushing 
there. Your own lacks and pains and discomforts are 
multiplied by the lacks and pains and discomforts in 
all the other beehive cells pressing upon yours, till you 
feel the many-sided weight to the very center of your 
being. 

Poverty in the country, where at least you are not 
scanted of air and space and quiet, is scarcely poverty 
at all ; it is deprivation, but neither stunting nor 
suffocation. A country child, though he tramp by 
the side of a gypsy or beggar, or house at night, half 
fed, half covered, in a tumble-down hovel, is not, 
after all, so much to be pitied if he have his freedom. 
That outdoor play-school which Maurice Thompson 
talks of,— the school of the woods, the fields, the hills, 
the streams ; the school from which the greatest think- 
ers of the world have been graduated, — this, at least, 
is open to him, without money and without price. It 
is the education in ideality, which such tuition gives, 
which is the great lack of our poor city children, and 



42 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 

this which it seems essential to supply to them, in so 
far as our limited knowledge and powers admit. 

Contrast the play-school of nature with the play- 
school of man, which is naturally and inevitably the 
street, and weigh one against the other, — the train- 
ing given by each. 

Plato, in his "Republic," plans his system of edu- 
cation so that the first twenty years of every human 
life shall be in the main devoted to a nurture of the 
abiding, deeper, greater self, that it may become easily 
the master over the other, the transient self. It is 
to be a training of the unconscious sort; such a feed- 
ing of the young mind and the young heart that they 
shall come to love above all things those which are 
honorable and intrinsically lovable, and to hate those 
which are dishonorable and unlovable; so to feed 
this under self that at length it becomes the master- 
ful self. 

We need not pause here to inquire wiiether or not 
it would be possible to regulate for such a length of 
time all the influences surrounding the young human 
creature; or, even if it were possible, whether we 
should be sufficiently daring to make the attempt. 
It is practical and timely, however, to inquire for 
ourselves just what sort of an unconscious training is 
given by the play-school of the street, and endeavor 
to supply to its pupils, as best we may, some of its 
most glaring deficiencies. That such schooling is al- 
together evil no one for a moment supposes. Lessons 
in patience, courage, generosity, and sympathy are 



THE CHILDREN S GUILD OF PLAY. 43 

often set there for those who are apt at learning. But 
the atmosphere is confused, noisy, full of ugly, often 
brutal, sights and sounds, harsh, sordid, and greatly 
lacking in reach, insight, vision, and ideality. 

It is in the endeavor to supply some of these ele- 
ments, to touch the imagination and the heart as well 
as train the body, that the Children's Guild of Play 
has been organized in London; and because many of 
the ideas which it is working out are true and valuable 
ones, it is here described, as a contribution toward 
the settlement of one of the vexed questions of great 
cities. The founder of the Guild, Sister Grace of the 
Bermondsey Settlement, South London, says that it 
was started "as an attempt to solve the problem of 
giving the children of our slums a chance of a cleaner 
life than would seem to be their lot by inheritance." 
Its proceedings include not only games, singing, and 
music, but the telling of fairy tales; its meetings are 
held on one evening in each week, and it is generally 
found that the managers of Board-schools are willing 
to throw open one or more of their rooms for these 
occasions, thus avoiding the expense of rent. 

The Bermondsey Settlement Guild is managed by 
three workers, — musician, play-mistress, and story- 
teller. — and the exercises are conducted as follows : 
"Our Guild-evening," says Sister Grace, "begins with 
the opening of the doors, when little girl children of 
all ages march in two by two. Sometimes they may 
have been waiting outside in fog or rain for an hour 
beforehand. After every one has made a curtsey 



44 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 

and said 'Good evening/ the games begin — quaint old 
English song-games, with pretty words, rhythmic 
lu lies, and dainty gestures; and then come fairy talcs 
and songs — the three together providing continual 
motion for restless limbs, voices, and brains. And 
before we go away we kneel together for the beautiful 
closing prayers and benediction. That is all." 

The Guild has no punishments save those which 
follow as the natural penalties of broken laws, no 
rewards save that greatest of all pleasures, the work- 
ing for others. There are no buns or oranges, no 
costly toys, no magic-lantern shows, no direct religious 
teaching; there is not even the giving away of useful 
information; while the highest prize ever offered is 
the privilege of being allowed to go and play before 
the children's own parents, or before old people in the 
workhouse or infirmary. 

It is intended that the Guild of Play shall supple- 
ment the brain-training of the day school, and it is 
considered essential that every helper should personally 
know, and thus be able to co-operate with, the teachers 
of all her play-hour children. "The benefits arising 
from such co-operation will not be all with the chil- 
dren/* says the Guild, "nor, as regards teachers and 
helpers, will they be one-sided. Such comradeship is 
truest socialism; such workers truly are pioneers in 
the great march of the coming century. " 

There is nothing new, it may be said in passing, 
in the use of music, singing, and games as instruments 
of education. Plato, Aristotle, Quintilian, Comenius, 



THE CHILDREN'S GUILD OF PLAY. 45 

Rousseau, Fichte, Pestalozzi, Locke, Spencer, Richter, 
and Froebel, all had many wise things to say about 
them ; and if, in the endeavor to establish a Guild of 
Play, we meet persons unwilling to contribute to our 
needs because doubtful of the benefits accruing, we 
may batter down their walls of prejudice with argu- 
ments drawn from the pages of these great philos- 
ophers. 

The act of singing in itself is a healthful one, 
setting the chest to work, expanding the lungs, and 
making the blood course through the veins with double 
force, while the gestures and rhythmic activities at- 
tendant upon the plays are most valuable for the 
modern child who is constrained to stillness in the 
schoolroom for so many hours of each day. 

Modern life tends everywhere to the hiving together 
in cities and the results are seen in the great increase 
of nervous disorders. That these ailments are present 
in the bud in many of the pupils of our metropolitan 
public schools will be attested by any physician who 
has made a study of them, and oftentimes they 
are so well advanced as to render a cure a matter of 
considerable difficulty. "By prolonging the period 
of play," as one of its best advocates has said, "we 
shall be providing a counterbalance for this tendency.*' 

"The need of muscle-culture in our great cities 
is an imperative one," says George E. Johnson, in 
his monograph on Games and Play; and rhythmic 
movement in part supplies this need. It is clear, too, 
that children cannot engage in these singing games 



46 TTIE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 

without learning many lessons in self-control and 
comradeship, and these are valuable qualities, useful 
every day in life. The imagination must also be 
trained and the aesthetic faculties cultivated by play 
and story-telling, and such training is of necessity 
altogether absent in the education of the ordinary 
street child. He is precocious, poor infant phenom- 
enon, in all that concerns the practical, while the 
ideal in him, his powers of loving and dreaming, are 
crushed and pallid like the growing things under a 
stone. It is for this reason that carefully selected fairy 
tales, and fairy tales only, are told to the children of 
the Guilds, for, as Sister Grace quotes most appro- 
priately, "where there is no vision, the people perish." 
"A child without imagination/ ' she goes on to say, 
"will become a man without ideals, with narrow sym- 
pathies here, and little interest or treasure in the great 
Unknown Land. Wherefore let us kindle imagina- 
tion ; and for this purpose we know of no better in- 
struments than fairy tales. " 

The children are happy on these golden evenings 
of song and play and story, as we well may fancy; 
and happiness is not only their right but their neces- 
sity if they are to develop properly in mind, soul, and 
body. It is surely not much to ask of those who have 
everything in life which these little ones lack, that they 
should give an hour or two a week of their leisure to 
a service of love, such as the Guild of Play. 

It may be that American guilds would be con- 
ducted on different lines, in some respects, from those 



THE CHILDREN'S GUILD OF PLAY. 47 

of the Bermondsey Settlement. There seems no 
reason, for instance, why boys as well as girls should 
not have the benefit of games and singing, though 
their organizations might not be conducted in the 
same way. It would seem probable, too, that plays 
might be found superior to the old English singing- 
games in some respects, and full as rich in the desired 
elements of repetition, succession, sequence, dialogue, 
rhythm, and rhyme. And when the children have 
grown to know one another and to feel the influence 
of their leader, we may plainly see that all the ends 
we are striving to gain would be more easily attained 
by a country play-hour when weather and season are 
favorable. Although the trolley seems to some of us 
an impertinent attack upon the retirement of rural 
life and a noisy, vexatious interruption to quiet and 
seclusion, yet it cannot be denied that it takes away 
from him who hath to give to him who hath not and so 
is one factor among the great leveling tendencies of 
modern social conditions. 

Thousands of green fields are now easily and 
cheaply accessible to the dwellers in great cities where 
a few years ago they were only to be reached by horse 
or bicycle power and thus we may, with very little 
expenditure of time or money, transport our Guilds 
to the country since the country cannot come to them. 

Again, when we consider the literary side of the 
undertaking, there are numberless stories and poems, 
outside of the realm of fairy-lore, which would serve 
our purposes occasionally, but these are variations 



48 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 

upon the original theme which would occur to any- 
one who was sufficiently interested in it, and when 
all is said, it is the spirit of the enterprise which will 
be found to be its important element. 

It is vitally important, too, that the right kind of 
persons should manage the Play Guilds. The work is 
not for teachers worn out with the nervous strain of 
the day; it is not for the toilers either among men 
or women ; it is for those who are fresh, bright, joyous, 
unworn by care or labor, whose own sheltered youth 
and prolonged opportunities for many kinds of play 
have preserved in them their vigor and optimism and 
who can lift the children above the pressure of the 
street on the wings of their own life- joy. 



THE GUILD OF THE BRAVE POOR THINGS. 

"It is to be called the Book of Poor Things, mother dear. 
It 's a collection — a collection of Poor Things who 've been 
hurt, like me; or blind, like the organ-tuner; or had their 
legs or their arms chopped off in battle, and are very good 
and brave about it, and manage very, very nearly as well 
as people who have got nothing the matter with them. 
Father does n*t think Poor Things is a good name. He 
wanted to call it Masters of Fate, because of some poetry. 
What was it, father?" 

" 'Man is man, and master of his fate,' " quoted the 
Master of the House. 

"Yes, that 's it. But I don't understand it so well as Poor 
Things. They are Poor Things, you know, and of course 
we shall only put in brave Poor Things, not cowardly Poor 
Things." 

If you ever happened to meet a little lad named 
Leonard, who lives in the pages of Mrs. E wing's 
"Story of a Short Life," then you will remember, with 
misty eyes and' an ache in the throat, that chapter 
wherein the hero directs from his wheeled chair the 
ruling and printing and illuminating of his Book of 
Brave Poor Things. 

The child has been the victim of an accident, 
which not only makes him a cripple, but racks him 
with distress and pain, and, under the nervous strain 
of the affliction and the consequent "spoiling,*' lie has 
become capricious, tyrannical, a torment to himself 
and to others. Fortunately, when things have reached 
a climax of wretchedness, his wise mother comes to 



50 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 

the rescue, and, appealing to the hoy's courage, his 
sense of honor, and to his passionate interest in soldiers 
and soldierly qualities, teaches him that, though 
a military life can never now be his, he yet may be 
"a brave cripple. 1 ' The ancestral motto of the family, 
Lcietus sorte men, is so interpreted to the child that he 
grows to feel it a matter of duty to be happy with his 
fate, and begins to think that perhaps there are "lots 
of brave afflicted people, and perhaps there never was 
anybody but him who was n't so." 

Leonard has a touching interview with a hero 
of the Victoria Cross, in which, true to his great life- 
interest, he is intent on finding out whether, if he 
is very good and patient about a lot of pain in his back 
and his head, that would count up to be as brave as 
having one wound if he *d been a soldier; and whether 
being ill in bed might count like being a soldier in a 
hospital. 

"I suppose nothing — not even if I could be good 
always, from this minute right away till I die — noth- 
ing could ever count up to the courage of a Y. C. ?" 
questions the boy, wistfully; and the brave, tender- 
hearted wearer of the priceless bit of iron answers 
tremulously, "God knows it could, a thousand times 
over !" 

Leonard, and the Book which he thought out so 
carefully, suggested to Sister Grace the formation in 
the Bermondsey Settlement, South London, of the 
Guild of the Brave Poor Things. It is an association 
of men, women, and children, of any creed or no 



THE GUILD OF THE BRAVE POOR THINGS. 51 

creed, who are crippled, blind, or maimed in any way. 
Anyone is eligible for membership if thus afflicted 
and if at the same time he is resolved to make a good 
fight in life. Laetus sorte mea, Happy in my Lot, is 
the watchword of the Guild; and its hymn, the one 
which Airs. Swing's hero called the Tug-of-War hymn, 
because, at the military chapel which he often at- 
tended, the soldiers sang the verse beginning, "A noble 
army, men and boys/' with such tremendous impetus 
and vigor that, after a brief contest, they invariably 
pulled away from the organ and the whole choir. 

The deepest purpose of the Guild, says Sister 
Grace, is found in this verse of the hymn: 

"Who best can drink His cup of woe, 
Triumphant over pain; 
Who patient bears His Cross below, 
He follows in His train." 

It is by "awakening the heroic that slumbers in 
everv heart," and by teaching its members that the 
courage to bear and the courage to dare are really one 
and the same, that the Guild lives up to its motto; for 
its founder believes that it is not enough patiently to 
accept one's life-burden, but that one must also learn 
to bear it cheerfully. If it be heavy it is all the more a 
proof of strength and valor to support its weight brave- 
ly and in such fashion that each soldier in the suffering 
army may profit by the spirit and enthusiasm of the 
comrade marching by his side. 

It is inherent in the very idea of the Guild that 



5Z THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 

it should bring light and brightness into cold, gray 
lives; and so, in every room in which it meets, the 
walls are draped with the Union Jack, and high above 
shines out in brilliant scarlet letters the watchword, 
Laetus sorie mea. There are badges, membership 
cards, and banners, all in red, the soldier's color, and 
the true military spirit is insisted upon in every way. 

"It is important/' says Sister Grace, "to guard 
against anything like a sentimental glorification of 
suffering; and, to shut out such a possibility, the 
Guild must have a knowledge of the conditions of 
life of all its members, and must be ready to do every- 
thing that can be done to minimize their actual 
distresses." It is not a charity, however, and does not 
give relief; it is merely a friendly organization of 
afflicted persons meeting frequently with leaders who 
are interested in their troubles and who can give 
strength and courage to bear them more bravely. 
Where relief must be given, it is done through other 
societies, and so there is no asking nor giving here, 
save in the things of the spirit. 

The Guild of Brave Poor Things was organized 
in 1894, and so great a need has it apparently met, 
and so well has it taken advantage of the "together" 
spirit of the age, that it now has six branches, with 
a membership of more than five hundred. It is a 
pitiful thought that there are so many persons in one 
locality who belong by right to such a club, but even 
more pitiful would it be were nothing done to lighten 
their double woes of poverty and disease. 



THE GUILD OF THE BRAVE POOR THINGS. 53 

The various things necessary to a successful con- 
duct of the Guild are thus stated by Sister Grace: 

"1. To visit members in their own homes and 
establish personal links between the workers and mem- 
bers. 

2. To hold regular meetings at stated intervals 
for games, singing, and social intercourse. 

3. To bring, as far as possible, technical classes 
and suitable lectures within the reach of members of 
the Guild; to arrange for periodical excursions, con- 
certs, etc., for them, together with any other means of 
widening their necessarily restricted lives. 

The Guild's rules are few and simple : merely that 
the name, motto, and hymn shall be the same in all 
branches, that flags shall always be used in the decora- 
tion of the rooms, that the soldierly virtues of loyalty 
and prompt obedience be cultivated in every way, and 
that records be kept of the name, address, and condi- 
tion of each member. 

And what are the proceedings at the Guild meet- 
ings ? you ask. 

These may be held either in the afternoon or even- 
ing, and so great is the interest in them that many 
of the members gather at the entrance long before 
opening time, reminding one of that even in Caper- 
naum when the sun did set and when they brought 
unto Him all that were sick of divers diseases, and 
all the city was gathered together at the door. 

There are blind people here; there are deaf-mutes; 
there are paralytics who can drag themselves a Ion--. 



51 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 

and others who must be pushed in chairs or peram- 
bulators; there are as many phases of distress and 
deformity, perhaps, as there are persons, and all ages 
are represented; but there is much good-fellowship, 
and constant helpfulness. 

Tables are set in the Guild-room, where books and 
papers and magazines are scattered for those of seeing 
eyes; there is a piano for the blind; there is a lending- 
library from which books may be taken home; there 
are toys for the younger children; and there is always 
a painting table, for it seems that mottoes and pic- 
tures to color are in great demand the year around. 

Many of the blind women bring their knitting or 
other handiwork and chat quietly together as their 
busy fingers move ; the men fall into conversation over 
the games and pictures, and thus the grace of friend- 
ship is added to these lives of deprivation and suffer- 
ing. 

In many of the Guilds weekly half-hour lectures 
on science, history, and travel are given, and seem to 
be greatly enjoyed; and always when games and lec- 
tures and conversation are over there is the ever- 
delightful singing practice. If any of the members 
are found to have special musical ability, or a knack at 
recitation, they are encouraged to help in entertain- 
ment, and considerable talent is thus discovered and 
a new value given to the self -estimate of the possessor. 

At the close of the exercises the roll is always 
called, each soldier of the army, from baby to gray- 
beard, answering to his name, and then comes Leon- 



THE GUILD OF THE BRAVE POOR THINGS. 55 

ard's "Tug-of-War" hymn, for which all stand, or at 
least assume as nearly erect a position as weak limbs 
and twisted spines will allow. 

It is their battle-hymn, and if with its echoes ring- 
ing in their ears they can go back to their poor homes 
and quit themselves like men, if they can fly their 
scarlet banner with its joyous motto, if they can fight 
the battle of life with courage, heavily weighted as they 
are, then indeed may they be called the bravest army 
that ever went forth to warfare. 



THE SOCIAL INCLOSURE OF CHILDHOOD. 

"It is not only likely — it is inevitable — that the child 
make up his personality, under limitations of heredity, by 
imitation, out of the 'copy' set in the actions, temper, 
emotions, of the persons who build around him the social 
inclosure of his childhood." 

— ./. M. Baldwin. 

There is an old Spanish proverb which runs, "Tell 
me with whom thou walkest and I will tell thee who 
thou art," and if we were to invent a game calling for 
pithy sayings from all languages on any given subject 
we should probably find that the greatest number 
would cluster about the influence of companionship. 
We need no further proof that the topic has always 
been prominent in the attention of men and we 
may easily conjecture that the nucleus of thought on 
the subject came from arboreal foremothers who 
plucked their offspring away from undesirable play- 
mates and, as they tossed them into their own trees, 
sharply queried why they never could be content at 
home. 

Rousseau felt so strongly that out of the three 
educations which life brings to us, — the education 
of nature, circumstances, and other men, — only the 
last could be partially controlled, that he proposed, as 
you remember, absolutely to isolate his "Emile" from 
the rest of the world. 

This idea is of course quite impracticable and. 



58 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 

even if it were not so, would be undesirable, for it is 
not so much the object of education to keep the human 
being away from temptation as to render him proof 
against it. It never was of any use, you know, to wall 
the princess up in the high stone tower, for the prince 
always came that way, and when other means of ingress 
failed he climbed up the golden ladder of her braided 
locks. 

To keep children away from companionship is 
impossible, and the only course remaining is to see 
that it be of the best. The modern demands of 
education require the mother to be so Argus-eyed that 
it is no wonder if she misses seeing something now 
and then in one and another direction, but if she 
is sightless or of weak vision here, the matter is a 
serious one. It is difficult to realize perhaps that the 
flaxen-haired, blue-ginghamed dumpling "playing 
house" with your daughter over there can be any 
more important in her influence than the robin that 
sings in the bough above them, but if you think so you 
will be mistaken, — seriously, perhaps fatally, mis- 
taken. Little Blue Gingham may easily, if she have 
time enough, taint your child's mind for life, and the 
taint will be the more enduring if the mind be an 
imaginative one. She may implant vicious thoughts, 
ideas, and images there, which it will require years 
of struggle to drive out, or rather to suppress, for they 
can never be altogether driven out. You are thought- 
less of danger because you know the inheritance of 
your own child and know that she is flower-like in 



THE SOCIAL INCLOSUKE OF CHILDHOOD. 59 

purity. How much do you know of little Blue Ging- 
ham, pray, that you leave the two children together 
those long uninterrupted hours? 

It is a much-discussed question whether parents 
should choose their children's companions for them, 
or allow them to make their own selection. Certainly 
the latter, we would say upon reflection, proper sur- 
veillance being afterwards exercised upon the chosen 
friend and upon his influence. It is to be remembered 
that these boys and girls of ours, tiny as they may be, 
are already possessed of independent individualities 
and have their own fancies and characteristics. It is 
by no means to be assumed that their tastes in person- 
ality are the same as our own, and when we select some 
neat and proper "Miss Nancy" and present him to 
Jack as "such a sweet little playfellow" it is not un- 
likely that Jack will find him intolerably dull and 
prefer the company of Patsy Hogan over in the alley. 
And we should reflect, before we send Patsy flying 
home, that though he be neither any too clean, nor his 
clothing any too whole, yet he may after all be a better 
hoy than Miss Nancy and have a better influence. 

Xo, it is inevitable that the child should commonly 
find his companions in the families of those who build 
his social inclosure about him, but within those limits 
let him do his own selecting and see only that you 
watch the playmate carefully, as well as the influence 
he is exerting. 

The little child is daily creating himself from 
the material about him and it is, as Emerson said, the 



60 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 

things of which he is not thinking that are educating 
him. If the mother can supply him with good models 
at this juncture Froebel tells us that she can accom- 
plish by a touch light as a feather what later she could 
hardly do by a hundredweight of words. The child 
must imitate, he can only grow by imitation, there- 
fore observe him closely and note the unfolding of 
his nature and the possibilities for good or evil that 
it discloses. 

You may think if the evil tendencies are there, 
that he will inevitably develop them sooner or later, 
no matter what influences surround him now. Not 
at all. So long as the earth rolls the Jack will never 
come out of the box unless you loosen the cover, and 
if he stays down in the dark long enough his mechan- 
ism will so rust that he cannot jump at all. 

Give serious attention to the child's playfellows 
then, watch their effect in his speech and in his temper 
and mannerisms, and keep so close to his heart that 
he is willing to tell you something of his thoughts and 
feelings. In no other way can you so protect him from 
evil and give him a bias toward good as in providing 
him with the right companions. 

And are these only to be found among other chil- 
dren? you ask. Ah no, the matter is not so simple a 
one as that. The growing human being needs the 
companionship of nature as well, the sweet influence 
of trees and birds and winds and the sense of respon- 
sibility and tenderness engendered in his heart by the 
dependence of his pets upon him. 



THE SOCIAL INCLOSURE OF CHILDHOOD. 61 

Later, when the mysteries of the printed page are 
opened to him, the papers and magazines and books 
which he reads are wisely to be selected; and here is 
a potent influence for good or evil not sufficiently 
considered. Search your own recollections and consult 
child-students of to-day in choosing this literature, 
for there are certain ages which imperiously demand 
certain kinds of reading and will have it by one means 
or another. If the boy of eight to ten years cannot get 
"Robinson Crusoe/' or "The Jungle Books," he will 
read the adventures of "Red Dog, Blue Horse and 
Ghost-that-lies-in-the-Wood," and learn to content 
himself with Brummagem jewelry when he might 
have had pure gems of radiance and color. 

And when we have done all these things so far as 
our limited knowledge admits, shall we not think of 
the child's earliest, best, nearest companions, those 
whose -faces are the first he sees, whose hands the first 
he grasps, whose words the first he understands, whose 
lives encompass him as the blue depths the star? If 
aught be amiss with this dear companionship, rough 
is the road for childish feet to climb and dark indeed 
the skies that bend above the little pilgrim. 

Underneath all other friendships this rests firm, 
strong and steadfast and as the dewdrop exhales from 
the sea to wander above in independent life, but still 
returns at last to mingle with the waters that gave it 
birth, so the child-heart, after each new journey into 
the unknown, slips back again into the great profound 
of father and mother love. 



DAME NATURE'S PLAY-SCHOOL. 

"If so the swiftness of the wind 
Might pass into my feet; 
If so the sweetness of the wheat 
Into my soul might pass, 
And the clear courage of the grass." 

— E. R. Sill. 

"Every third generation should he rolled in the 
dust," said Henry Ward Beecher; and the great divine 
was right in this, as in many another thing, whether 
he meant that the race needs frequently to go back to 
first principles and begin over again, or whether he 
thought only of the Herculean myth and the strength 
the earth gives out to those who lean upon her bosom. 

As the love of nature was the dominant passion 
of the primitive world, so it lives again in the little 
child, who is ever re-making history in his own per- 
sonality. He is a natural tiller of the ground, a 
natural observer and collector, and all he needs is op- 
portunity, a hint of encouragement, and a word of 
direction, to mount these hobbies and gallop bravely 
off on all sorts of delightful and profitable journeys. 

Eor once in the year, at least, many children are 
given the key of the fields, or the freedom of the 
seashore and, overcome by the possibilities before 
them, stand uncertain what to do. Xor are their small 
country cousins prepared to lead them in most eases, 
for children, and indeed grown persons, who live in 



64 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 

the very midst of nature's wonders, often go about, 
like falcons, hooded from the light. 

How shall we teach these little ones to see, and 
what shall we teach them to do? for they cannot be 
happy, even in vacation, if they have not some kind 
of regular employment. Spring and summer are' the 
golden times of the year for watching living and grow- 
ing things, for investigation and experiment, and 
there is no better way to compass all these ends than 
to plant and tend a garden. Give the child a small 
plot of ground ready spaded and dressed, then, and 
let him sow a few hardy, quick-growing flower and 
vegetable seeds, fencing the plot afterwards, watering 
and weeding it. No matter if he only sows lettuce 
and sunflowers, his products will still combine the 
useful and the beautiful, and one plant is as good as 
another for observing the wonders of germination and 
growth. 

Teach him also in these summer days how to pluck 
flowers, cutting them carefully with proper length 
of stem, and by leaving a few specimens on each plant 
securing against the entire extermination of the 
species. The natural desire of the child seems to be 
to tear up whole families and plantations of flowers, 
roots and all, with one fierce tug, a desire which, grati- 
fied often, soon rids a country-side of its natural deco- 
rations as effectually as if fire and sword had been laid 
to them. Gathered in such careless fashion they are as 
carelessly guarded, and one frequently knows that a 
junior naturalists' club has been in the vicinity, merely 



DAME NATURE'S PLAY-SCHOOL. 65 

by the clusters of faded blossoms lying in the dust of 
the roadway, by broken branches, trodden leaves and 
grass, and a general effect in once flowery nooks and 
bowers of beauty as if a herd of wild mustangs on the 
stampede had trampled through them. 

Children need commonly to learn that it is possible 
to love and admire a flower, indeed to study it and 
know its characteristics, and still leave it on the 
parent stem. As Monckton Milnes said: — 

"Simply enjoy the present loveliness! 
Let it become a portion of your being! 
Close your glad gaze, but see it none the less; 
No clearer with your eye, than spirit, seeing. 
And when you part at last, turn once again, 
Swearing that beauty shall be unforgot." 

When this lesson has been mastered and the further 
one of handling the blossom respectfully when it be- 
comes necessary to cut it, we may, if large gardens or 
fields of wild flowers are at our command, instruct our 
pupil how to make up posies for hospital or flower 
mission work, and even before he attains to the degree 
of carefulness and dexterity necessary for this labor of 
love, he may be engaged as a helper at watering-time, 
a little inevitable splashing and spilling being wisely 
overlooked. 

For still younger children there are many delight- 
ful plays with materials drawn from nature's toy-shop. 
There are wreaths and garlands to be made of leaves 
and flowers; there are chains of lilacs and dandelions 
and daisies and four o'clocks, there are nuts and seeds 



66 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 

to be strung, there are dolls of poppy seed-cups to be 
dressed and tea-sets to be made from the same ma- 
terials and from acorns. Then there are charming 
ladies with long dresses to fashion from morning- 
glories ; tiny leaf hats and bonnets to be fastened to- 
gether with thorns and twigs ; furniture to be made of 
burdock burrs; rose pancakes to mix, rose petals to 
gather for potpourri; mud pies to bake in small tins, 
and leaves and twigs and ferns to press into wet sand, 
making attractive designs and borders. On rainy days 
the leaves and ferns may be cut from green paper and 
mounted on cardboard ; or, if there is a clay bank near, 
the heavier ones may be impressed upon clay plaques of 
various shapes which may afterwards be baked in a slow 
oven. 

The study of the birds of a neighborhood might 
occupy every waking hour of a whole company of 
children for an entire summer, first learning to watch 
them quietly and unobtrusively, cither with their own 
bright eyes or with an opera-glass, then with the aid 
of a bird-book becoming acquainted with their names ; 
next studying their habits, their ways of nest-building, 
their songs and calls, their special services to man, 
and making as thorough an investigation as may be 
possible of their favorite foods. If an older person 
will record these observations of the children they may 
be found really valuable in the preservation of bird 
life, and a remedy may thus be discovered for the 
startling decrease of our native songsters in many 
parts of the country. 



DAME NATURE'S PLAY-SCHOOL. 67 

Dr. C. F. Hodge of Clark University, who is an 
acknowledged authority on the subject, tells us that 
during the last fifteen years this decrease in thirty of 
cur states and territories amounts to forty-six per 
cent, and he suggests that children be taught to make 
safe places of shelter and bird-houses for their feath- 
ered friends, and especially to provide them with food 
in bad winters. Their houses should be built with 
perches or a tiny platform below each door, should be 
made of proper proportions and placed at a safe height 
from the ground.* One live bird, Dr. Hodge calculates, 
may be worth one hundred dollars a year to a com- 
munity, so considerations of economy as well as senti- 
ment may well urge us on to the task of caring for 
them. Dr. Hodge also suggests, as a useful autumn 
occupation for children, that they be taught to take a 
census each season of the birds in their own localitio by 
counting the nests after the leaves have fallen. Thus 
some reliable information will be gathered as to the 
gradual increase or decrease of our bird-neighbors year 
by year. 

Then there are the insects to be studied, the valu- 
able little ladybug or ladybird, loved by all children; 
the ants, bees, and wasps ; the hornets, spiders, dragon 
flies, and butterflies; the potato bugs and cucumber 
bugs with their shining striped coats, and much of 
real importance is to be learned as to their food, 
their time of appearance, their transformations, and 



*For plans, proportions and designs, see Cornell Nature Study Leaflets 
and Bulletins, No. 10, April 10, 1898. 



(58 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 

their ability to serve or injure man. If we knew the 
true relation between birds and insects it is said that 
we could entirely transform our insect-ridden land 
in two decades, but to do this, authoritative informa- 
tion must be disseminated. Dr. Hodge makes an 
interesting calculation on this subject. "The school 
system of the United States," he says, "costs $420,- 
000,000 a year, while authorities on the subject esti- 
mate that insects destroy crops to the value of between 
$300,000,000 and $400,000,000 yearly. Children can 
save the larger portion of this vast sum and have a 
most delightful time during their work by learning 
something of nature and applying their knowledge to 
the assistance of those species of birds that will destroy 
noxious insects." 

It is doubtful whether the aforesaid children would 
be at all stimulated in any such task by a reali- 
zation of the immense sum they would thereby be 
saving the country, and they would scarcely be im- 
pressed even by knowing that they were earning 
their own tuition by their labors. Four hundred and 
twenty millions of dollars is an impossible sum to 
realize and the mere work of reading the numbers 
would be fatiguing to a youthful naturalist, but if 
"those set in authority over him" should ever complain 
of the long hours he spends a-birding he can offer as his 
best excuse the mints of money he is thus virtually 
helping his beloved country to save. 

Bats, snakes, toads, frogs, earthworms — the names 
of the quintette are not attractive, but it is unlikely 



DAME NATURE'S PLAY-SCHOOL. 69 

that they would ever be repulsive to children if they 
were properly introduced, and it is certain that none 
of them, save possibly the snake in some parts of the 
country, would be at all harmful. The bat, for in- 
stance, if he can be gently caught and kept under glass 
for an hour while he is examined, is generally attrac- 
tive to children and is never afterward feared if his 
work in the world is explained. 

As to toads and frogs, among the most interesting 
and useful of all animals, they may easily be studied 
either in neighboring ponds or in a home-made aquari- 
um, from the egg to the bright-eyed, beautifully dap- 
pled grown-up creature. 

It is estimated that one toad eats in a single season 
cutworms that would else have destroyed twenty dol- 
lars worth of crops, the family services in this direc- 
tion being so well known in France that they are sold 
by the dozen in that enlightened country for the pro- 
tection of gardens. 

During last summer's drought certain members of 
a junior naturalists' club were so much impressed 
by this information, as well as by the yeoman's service 
done by the tree-toad in destroying insects and the 
unceasing labors of the frog at the same task, that 
they became alarmed at the way the tadpoles were dy- 
ing off and, translating their faith into works, scooped 
many of them up in tins and carried them to a better 
supply of water. 

From zoology we turn to the wide and not less 
interesting field of botany, and here the subject of 



70 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 

collections naturally comes up. All the children of 
a neighborhood may join in this work, from the toddler 
to the boy in his teens. A pleasant task is to gather, 
mount, and mark a certain number, say fifteen each, 
of the leaves, flowers, seeds, and grasses of a district, 
keeping leaves of trees in one category, of shrubs and 
flowering plants in another and so on. 

If any prudent pel rent should fear that quests such 
as these collections would entail, over wood and field 
and meadow, would bring danger in the form of poison 
to the child, who naturally touches and handles every- 
thing he passes, we may answer that there are, after all, 
very few poisonous leaves or berries in our country and 
that these are easily distinguishable by appearance or 
odor. As Froebel says, "Each one of these plants 
utters its own word of warning." 

William Hamilton Gibson in his "Sharp Eyes" 
tells us that there is one page of botany which every 
dweller in the country should learn, that which deals 
with the Ehus or sumach. There are five species 
more or less common in the eastern part of the United 
States, but it appears that only two of these are 
poisonous, and Mr. Gibson offers several verses con- 
veying information as to their appearance, — jingles 
which can be learned in a moment by any child and 
which will serve as mental talismans against danger. 

Ferns, shells, and sea-moss make equally good 
collections, of course, and there is scope for consider- 
able ingenuity, suited to the various ages of the col- 



DAME NATURE'S PLAY-SCHOOL. 71 

lectors, in gathering the desired objects and devising 
ways of preserving them. 

For juvenile scientists, old enough for a moderately 
late bedtime, there is unlimited and fascinating occu- 
pation in studying the heavenly bodies. With a field 
glass and a chart they can con every night the blue 
page of the sky, learn the names and characteristic 
colors of the stars, spy out the nebulae or satellites, 
and by day study the mythological fancies woven about 
them. 

For still older children, there are the common 
minerals and rocks to learn, — not a difficult task with 
all the modern manuals on the subject, and boys 
especially seem to take great delight in gathering 
specimens and in making cabinets to hold them. 

A child who is really interested in Nature's serial 
story and who is old enough to write, will probably 
be delighted if he is given a diary in which he can 
record the happenings of every day of the season, — not 
only rainfall and sunshine, but the dates when the 
frogs begin to trill, when the various leaves unfold, 
when the different birds appear and disappear, when 
each flower of the long procession makes its bow, 
when the white butterflies come and the grasshoppers 
begin to whir and the crickets to chirp and the wasps 
to make friendly calls. Books already prepared may 
be had for this purpose, but an ordinary blank book 
with stout covers is as good, — is really better in fact, 
for it gives scope for individuality in choice of sub- 
ject, arrangement, and decoration. 



72 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 

It is generally found that all this nature work and 
stud}^ is made much more attractive if a number of 
children take it up together and band themselves into 
a club, which should be given an attractive name. An 
older person is needed as Secretary or Grand Adviser 
of such an association to direct the work, to record 
observations and mark specimens. Such a Grand Ad- 
viser will find the summer catalogues of all the pub- 
lishers rich with books on birds, reptiles, insects, 
flowers, trees, fishes, ferns, stars, and rocks, most of 
them provided with plates, colored or uncolored, and 
all pleasantly familiar in style and adapted to the 
needs of a tyro in science. 

Nature stories, too, the Grand Adviser will find 
very useful at the meetings of her society, to give a 
fillip to general interest, and poetry will furnish need- 
ful inspiration, for literature is ever the useful hand- 
maid of art and science. 



SHOOTING FOLLY AS IT FLIES. 

'"Eye Nature's walks, shoot folly as it flies, 
And catch the manners living as they rise; 
Laugh where we must, be candid where we can, 
But vindicate the ways of God to man.'' 

— Alexander Pope. 

There are many kinds of philanthropists. Some 
found free libraries and orphan asylums and found- 
ling homes; some give to foreign missions and histor- 
ical societies ; some support soup kitchens and temper- 
ance restaurants; others endow chairs in universities 
and fit out polar expeditions. There are others still 
who are retail dealers in the virtue, as it were, and 
do their good deeds in a small way, in accordance with 
their capital. Of this last class was' a certain New 
England lover of nature, who gave his whole time 
to preserving line trees from vandalism, driving where- 
ever it was reported that a tree was to be cut down and 
paying the sum demanded, that it might stand as a 
perpetual joy to the neighborhood. Another dear 
saint, whose memory is still green, devoted a portion 
of his income every year to dispatching letters held 
for postage; and an eminent author whom we all ad- 
mire, owns, as his philanthropic hobby, a manful 
attempt to lessen the sum of error in the world, by 
contradicting, in polite notes to the editor, any state- 
ment seen in the periodicals of the day which he can 



7-i THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 

prove to be false. This interesting whim leads him a 
busy and a vexatious life; but in one case, at least, and 
to-day, the present writer is resolved to emulate his 
example. 

There seems to be a distinct impression in some 
quarters of this country that the kindergarten is a 
sort of Mahometan Paradise, where children recline on 
flowery beds of ease, lulled by soft music, their only 
exertion being to open their mouths occasionally that 
they may receive the mental and spiritual blessings 
that drop from the gilded clouds above. 

A few representative extracts cut from some of 
our prominent papers in the last two months will 
illustrate this point of view. 

a. "The 'laissez faire treatment of children, 
which the kindergarten exploits." 

b. "Young j)eople did want to learn something 
once from those who cared for them, before the univer- 
sal 'kindergartening' r ' (Jove, give us patience!) 
"brought to them, without exertion, all that they once 
imbibed by discipline and by the restraint of learn- 
ing submissively and with effort/' 

c. "The kindergarten weakness is that it fails to 
recognize the fact that life is not all pleasure, and that 
children must learn to do things which are disagree- 
able, — the grim Puritanical idea, which makes men 
and women of backbone and moral fiber." 

cl. "The experiment of the kindergarten system 
has yet to demonstrate its values, and older people 
doubt whether the discipline of work for Avork's sake. 



SHOOTING FOLLY AS IT FLIES. 75 

and obedience out of respect for authority will find 
an adequate substitute in the plan where Jack's ex- 
perience is all play and no work. May kindergarten 
graduates find themselves prepared to meet the trials 
and disappointments of a world which has often de- 
manded in its successful combatants the bracing prepa- 
ration of early hardship and neglect/' 

Here are live distinct indictments of the kinder- 
garten ; — its "laissez faire" treatment of children, the 
indirect statement that it teaches without effort on 
the child's part or discipline on its own, a suggestion 
that its methods produce neither backbone nor moral 
fiber, an implication that it cultivates disobedience 
and scorn of authority, and finally a pious -hope that 
its graduates may be able to meet the trials and dis- 
appointments of this troublous world, — a hope whose 
tone reminds us of Reynard's politeness when he 
brought the duck to his kennel. 

Perhaps you are not familiar with the story; but 
it is rumored that he said, as he dropped the fluttering 
creature among his hungry cubs, "I trust you've had 
a pleasant ride, ma'am, and will enjoy yourself this 
evening." 

As there is no smoke without some fire, it is safe 
to suppose that the writers of these and similar criti- 
cisms may have seen certain specimens of kindergarten 
training which merited, in part at least, the diatribes 
directed against them; but granting this point, what 
logic or justice is there in condemning an entire edu- 
cational system because of some local fault of inter- 



76 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 

pretation? Do we flout the modern schools of medi- 
cine because unskilled practitioners kill their patients 
now and then? Do we condemn electric lighting be- 
cause a stray wire may occasionally be deadly? Do we 
jeer at Christianity because its votaries, sometimes 
fall from grace? 

This matter of the kindergarten is too vital a one, 
its issues too far-reaching, to be court-martialed 
and sentenced in this summary fashion. If indeed, 
when interpreted according to the precepts of its 
founder, it can be proven in the majority of cases to 
cultivate idleness, love of luxury, weakness, lack of 
moral fiber and energy, disobedience, misrule, and 
anarchy, then the sooner it is swept from the face of 
the earth the better for the nations thereof. If, on the 
contrary, these charges are unfounded, when made 
against the system considered as a whole, then a great 
wrong is being done to a profound educational phi- 
losophy devoutly believed in by large and increasing 
numbers of people. 

The charge that it fosters idleness might easily 
be refuted, it would seem, for the most ignorant on- 
looker could not but agree that there is no busier 
creature than a kindergarten child. His hands are 
literally never still; for when he is not occupied at 
his table, he is joyfully active in song and play. Nor 
is this occupation at the table anything which is 
forced upon him, which he does with little grace, 
drops as soon as possible, and neglects if the eye of 
authority be not upon him. It is done eagerly and 



SH00T1XG FOLLY AS IT FLIES. 77 

with delight, because it is worth doing and he loves 
it. If this is not "work for work's sake/' — a motive 
which our last critic affects to consider as out of date, 
where may we find a clearer illustration of the phrase ? 
for there is no reward connected with the industry, 
save that of success, and the finished product is com- 
monly bestowed upon others. So far is the kinder- 
garten child from idleness, that another class of critics 
cries out that he is being forced and overworked and 
that he is frequently made nervous by excess of in- 
dustry. 

The charge that FroebeFs system of education 
cultivates luxurious habits scarcely needs a moment's 
consideration. If keeping the pupil in a bright clean 
room, gay with plants and flowers, and hung with 
appropriate pictures, is breeding in him a love of 
luxury, then the Creator's idea of the earth as a 
training school for man must be a wholly mistaken 
one; and if the baby may not employ himself with 
brilliant colors and graceful forms, though fashioned 
from the plainest and most universal materials, then 
the promptings of Nature for playing with brightness 
must be altogether disregarded and set at naught. 

The statement that the kindergarten produces 
weakness and lack of energy in the pupil evidently 
springs from the belief that every experience comes 
to him ready made in that enchanted region; that he 
is a little pitcher which passively allows itself to be 
filled, in the Gradgrind fashion, with imperial gallons 
of facts. 



78 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 

If there is any one idea in the whole range of 
educational thought, upon which Froebel insisted and 
re-insisted, upon which he lectured and theorized, and 
which he conceived that he had finally reduced to prac- 
tice, it was that of self-activity on the part of the 
learner; and it would seem extremely difficult so 
to conduct a kindergarten as to hurl from its place 
one of the chief stones of its foundation. It is not 
to be supposed, because the work is agreeable to the 
child, that it is therefore so easy as to require no 
effort on has part. It is for the joy that is set before 
him that he endures the difficulties, and because he 
has once tasted the pleasures of success that he is 
willing to labor. 

Xo one who is familiar with the everyday handi- 
work of kindergarten children and knows how neat 
and well-wrought and artistic it commonly is, — no 
one who knows this and at the same time knows the 
powers and capabilities of children from three to six 
years old, could for a moment doubt, it might be 
supposed, that it was executed by dint of the greatest 
industry, energy, ardor, patience and perseverance. 

That children enjoy putting forth such efforts 
is quite true ; but one would imagine that this fact 
might place the matter in a still more favorable light. 
No one doubts the statement of one of our critics that 1 
the world often demands of its successful combatants 
the bracing preparation of early hardship and neglect ; 
but it can hardly be seriously supposed that an edu- 



SHOOTING FOLLY AS IT FLIES. 79 

cation al system for babies could successfully be built 
upon such a foundation. 

It is true enough that many of the world's heroes 
struggled up through bitter waters of trial to the 
sunlight above, but who is to say that such experiences 
are fitted for the non-hero, for the ordinary mortal 
who is not called upon to do great deeds or think 
great thoughts but simply to perform his own share 
of the world's work and to help a fainting brother 
here and there? 

Another skeptic, evidently a blood-relation of the 
writer whose criticisms we are now considering, lately 
complained in a Boston paper, that schooling nowadays 
from kindergarten to university is far too pleasurable 
a process, opined that the school should be a sort of 
drill-ground for the stern realities of life and pre- 
dicted that having had no previous experience in 
hardships the modern child would be conquered by 
the first attack of life's natural woes. 

This is a specious sort of reasoning, — one that 
when first considered seems to have some elements of 
good sense about it and yet, after all, looked at more 
closely, they melt away quickly enough. As a wise 
man said the other day in discussing the value of a 
happy, sheltered childhood ; "Does n't everybody know 
from observation that nine times out of ten the 
man who has been gently bred, with every puff of an 
ill wind kept from him by loving hands, meets a great 
disaster when it comes with a grace or a defiance, as 
the case may be, seldom seen in men who from baby- 



80 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 

hood up have known almost nothing but hard knocks ? 
Somehow the 'training process* lias taken the stamina 
out of such social victims — has depleted their courage 
so that the great ill, when it comes, overwhelms them 
completely, at least for a time." 

And now the question as to lack of moral fiber 
in the kindergarten graduate. What does this mean, 
exactly ? Probably that the child is selfish, capricious, 
unscrupulous, tyrannical, and perhaps untruthful. 
Certainly such children have been seen in many kin- 
dergartens ; but similar monsters have ere now issued 
from decent, well-ordered homes, and nobody has 
therefore cried out upon the sacred institution of 
the family ! 

How can a system of training which was framed 
to teach helpfulness, the value of co-operation, the 
beauty of brotherly love and the joy of working for 
others, degenerate, even under unfavorable conditions, 
into a nursery for selfishness ? 

How can a system whose tools of education are 
evolved systematically one from the other, and inter- 
connected: whose plays, of whatever kind, are logical 
developments of thought ; whose products require sus- 
tained, purposeful and continuous effort; — how can 
such a system, when administered by even a moderate 
intelligence, develop capriciousness ? 

How can a training which leads a child uniformly 
to consider the weaklings and younglings of the flock, 
to observe that leadership in any line is synonymous 
with worthiness, to note that "all are needed by each 



SHOOTING FOLLY AS IT FLIES. 81 

one' 7 and that his own powers, no matter how great, 
are lost without co-operation ;— how can this training 
develop a tyrant ? 

And how can a system which neither terrorizes, 
nor punishes revengefully; which endeavors to tea.!, 
fair-dealing and loving kindness; which daily gives 
concrete experience with the connection of cause and 
effect, with error and its natural result, with wrong- 
doing and retribution; which aims to cultivate clear 
seeing, clear thinking and clear speaking within its 
small range of subjects ;— how can it justly be charged 
with fostering unscrupulousness and falsehood? 

As to the "laissez faire" treatment of children, we 
might answer that in one sense, the phrase very well 
illustrates kindergarten procedure. We do believe, 
if you choose to put the matter in that way, in letting 
the children alone to a certain extent, believing that 
like trees, if they are set in the right soil, in the righl 
climate, properly cultivated and under the right at- 
mospheric conditions, they may be trusted to do their 
own growing. 

Our critic, however, has nothing of this in mind ; 
his meaning is closely allied to the last indictment,' 
that of the child-garden as a school of disobedience,' 
misrule, and anarchy. This complaint is more often 
seen than any of the others, and in any kindergarten 
center, one or two institutions could perhaps be found 
which would come dangerously near furnishing the 
prosecuting attorney in the case with evidence leading 
toward conviction. 



82 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 

The fact is that FroebeFs ideal in discipline is a 
difficult one to reach; and since kindergartners are 
only ordinary women, it is the less wonder that they 
sometimes fail to attain unto it. It must he a dis- 
cipline which has nothing of formalism or rigidity 
about it; it must exist by consent of the governed; 
it must be free and elastic, and yet it must implant 
a reverence for law, order, and authority in each one 
of the embryo citizens for whom it is maintained. 
No one doubts that the practical workings of a des- 
potism are simpler than those of a republic, and it 
was a republic that Froebel desired to make of his 
training school for babies. 

To suppose, however, that a good, or even a fairly 
good, kindergarten tolerates disobedience, or allows 
lawlessness or anarchy within its bounds, is the great- 
est of mistakes. There is no better discipline when 
the proper person is at the head of affairs, and none 
more ideal, because it aims to make each individual 
self-governing. Order is an essential part of every 
exercise of the day; a reverence for law is constantly 
instilled in every study whose beginnings the child 
takes up ; and under these conditions and with the 
right hand at the helm, the ship glides along on an 
even keel, her sails filled with the winds of peace 
and harmony. 

It must always be easier to handle a simple tool 
than a fine and delicate instrument; anybody can 
whittle, but not everybody can manage a turning 
lathe. If the kindergarten fails here and there, as it 



SHOOTING FOLLY AS IT FLIES. 83 

does of necessity fail, as everything must sometimes 
fail whose management is intrusted to human intelli- 
gence, we need not use these failures to discredit the 
principles upon which the system is based. We may 
disbar the unworthy practitioner, but we do not there- 
fore cry out upon the law. 

An adopted citizen of this country (the Hon. Carl 
Sehurz), one who is more truly an American than 
many who were born on the soil, lately said a few 
thing's in discussing the failures of a democratic gov- 
ernment which are not only valuable in themselves, 
but of application here. "Indeed,"' he said, "our 
government has had its failures and will have more. 
Honest and earnest criticism of those failures — even. 
if need be, the most searching and merciless — is a good 
citizen's duty. So is the pointing out of threatening 
dangers. But criticism and the pointing out of danger 
must never have the object of discouraging wise and 
vigorous effort for improvement. If they do, they de- 
generate into that dreary pessimism which, whenever 
something goes wrong, cries out that everything is lost. 
If the pessimist who employs his criticism to prove 
democratic government a failure would apply the same 
spirit and method of criticism to monarchical or aristo- 
cratic governments, he would easily prove them fail- 
ures, too — and, in some respects, failures of a worse 
kind. In fact, he would prove any and every form of 
government a failure, ending in the demonstration of 
the failure of the universe." 



THE PERSONALITY OF THE KINDERGAR- 
TEN TRAINING TEACHER. 

"How can I hear what you say when what you are is 
thundering in my ears?" 

— R. W. Emerson. 

Although the work of the Fates once done is 
done forever, although they have never been persuaded 
to take up again a task once fallen from their hands, 
yet no one supposes, I fancy, that their skill is un- 
erring, nor that there are not some days when they 
would not be the better for a competent overseer. 

It is obvious that Atropos, as she severs the thread 
of human life, sometimes snips it too quickly, and 
sometimes lets it run through her hands too long. If 
this were not so, why should some persons keep on 
living whose absence from the earth would greatly 
enhance its attractions, and some be taken away whose 
permanent presence seems the one thing desirable? 
Nor are the other weird sisters more trustworthy. 
Clotho is not a faultless workwoman, for it appears 
that she does not always spin her thread of the 
same tensile strength. It may be the fault of Lachesis, 
who, being a gifted person, is possibly subject to 
moods, and may not twirl the spindle at the same rale 
on every day of the week. It is difficult to fix the 
responsibility for the deviations, but obviously the 
thread turned out is by no means uniform, some of it 



86 THE MESSAGE OE EROEBEL. 

being thick enough for a hawser, and some fine enough 
to hem a cambric handkerchief. 

It is not so surprising, then, that we sometimes 
fail to get the right quality for the required purpose, 
since we commonly do not trouble to select from a 
large assortment, but rather take the first specimen 
that comes to hand. This is so true and so much a 
matter of everyday experience that the moral needs no 
pointing, the tale no adorning. George Eliot once 
said that when we consider the tragic errors made in 
selecting persons to fill the only relationships open 
to choice, we are overcome with gratitude to a wise 
Providence who so ruled it that all the remaining ties 
should be formed before our birth. Would that this 
arrangement might have been a little further extended, 
we sometimes think, to cover responsible positions in 
business and professional life; for then, had we seen 
the square peg painfully trying to squeeze himself 
into the round hole and the round peg ardently striv- 
ing to expand himself to fit the corners of the square 
one, we should have resigned ourselves to the inevi- 
table, bowed our heads and said "Kismet \" 

All this is by way of preamble; and now, if you 
are one of those persons whose minds are given to 
leaps, you have but to exercise your faculty and, con- 
sidering duly the title of the paper, you need read no 
further, for the subject is spread out before you. Yet 
for those who like better to be personally conducted on 
a tour than to make out the route for themselves, there 



THE KINDERGARTEN TRAINING TEACHER. 87 

is something still to say and a special application to 
make of the foregoing generalities. 

As the kindergarten grows in public favor and 
repute, as it is lifted into greater prominence, we are 
enabled to see more clearly the difficulties which attend 
the proper development of its principles and the draw- 
backs which hang upon it and impede its progress. 
There are many of these, — as there must of necessity 
be whenever a great idea is introduced to the world; 
but one of the foremost has always been the lack of 
ideal persons to interpret the doctrine. This is doubt- 
less no more true of the kindergarten than of Chris- 
tianity, for instance; but has it been equally appre- 
ciated? Those of us who have been studying Froebel 
so long that his views have become second nature 
feel that the pre-eminent value of the kindergarten, 
its distinguishing mark of perfection, lies in the out- 
look it gives upon the world, the clear, rational, and 
no less spiritual attitude of mind which it engenders. 
This is true of child, and true of adult; but true of 
neither, perhaps, if the kindergarten influence be not 
radiated from the right quarter. Much has been said 
of the personality of the ideal kindergartner, but have 
we sufficiently considered that of the ideal training- 
teacher? Yet why is one matter less important than 
the other? Or if there be a difference, why should 
not the personality of a teacher of teachers be a still 
more vital question, because through her students she 
must eventually act not only upon the children of the 
present but upon those of the future. 



88 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 

Lack of appreciation of the spiritual side of the 
kindergarten among those empowered to select train- 
ing teachers often results in thinking only of the 
mental attainments of the person under consideration. 
These may all be there ; she may possess every diploma, 
every certificate of proficiency and experience offered in 
the kindergarten field; and yet the highest powers of 
all may be lacking, — those that take their root in per- 
sonal^, deep down below the conscious self. Dr. 
Stanley Hall wisely says on this point : "We have 
sought the real ego in the intellect. It is not there, 
nor yet in the will, which is a far better expression 
of it than thought. Its nucleus is below the threshold 
of consciousness. The mistake of ego-theorists is akin 
to that of those who thought icebergs were best studied 
from above the surface, and were moved by winds; 
when, in fact, about nine tenths of their mass is sub- 
merged, and they follow the deeper and more constant 
oceanic currents, often in the teeth of gales, vitiating 
all the old aerodynamic equations/' 

It is from this deeper self, from this real per- 
sonality, that unconscious influence, which is the only 
real influence, is radiated; and it is this that we 
must regard, if what is so ethereal and indefinable may 
be apprehended, when we think of the ideal training 
teacher. Not that her mental equipment is to be 
held of less account, but that what lies below and 
around it is to be considered as something more price- 
less still. 

It has fallen to woman to be the £reat civilizer and 



THE KINDERGARTEN TRAINING TEACHER. 89 

educator of the race m all times, but her work has 
been accomplished by force of her spirituality, and it 
is there that her strongest influence must always lie, 
however learned, philosophical, and scientific future 
training may make her. 

Goethe's Iphigenia, says Dr. Felix Adler, works a 
twofold miracle in the play. "She humanizes a bar- 
barian and she absolves a sinner; and how does she 
accomplish these results? Not by what she does, but 
by what she is; — by her radiant personality, by the 
crystalline truthfulness of her nature, by the new 
faith in the good which she inspires in all who come 
in contact with her." 

Such a radiant personality, such a crystalline truth- 
fulness of nature, is needed by the kindergarten train- 
ing teacher, whose character must inevitably make deep 
impression upon the minds of her students; and the 
more surely so, as they are all engaged in the same 
work, all thrilling with the same thoughts, all busy 
upon the same experiments. "It is a characteristic of 
the estate of youth," says Dr. Hall again, "that it is 
molded by contact with great characters; and, if it 
does not find needed heroes and leaders, makes them 
often of the poorest material, or finds tinsel idols in 
the cheapest fiction." 

Let us remember that revelation is, and always 
must be, personal in the first instance; and that the 
depth, the strength, the height, the beauty, and the 
tenderness of kindergarten principles are unfolded 
to the pupil in the beginning only through the 



90 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 

instrumentality of the training teacher. We cannot 
doubt that in many cases the attitude of mind in which 
the student shall ever after regard her vocation, is abso- 
lutely fixed by her first month's work in the training 
class. The student may not know it ; her leader cannot 
know it, — for the influence which she is exerting 
comes from that part of herself which the plummet 
of her consciousness has never reached. Down, deep 
down, below the surface waters of what she has 
learned and read and been told and thought she 
believed, and thinks she is teaching, lies what she is; 
and it is this which is of supreme and eternal im- 
portance. 

"We buy ashes for bread; 
We buy diluted wine; 
Give me of the true, 
Whose ample leaves and tendrils, curled 
Among the silver hills of heaven, 
Draw everlasting dew." 



OUR XURSERY TALES— TO-DAY AXD YES- 
TERDAY. 

"I would not for any quantity of gold part with the 
wonderful tales which I have retained from my earliest in- 
fancy, or have met with in my progress through life." 

— Martin Luther. 

All the earth is full of tales to him who listens, 
and there is no there nor here, no then nor now for 
the fairy and the folk story. They were no more thor- 
oughly at home, no more suited to their environment, 
when they flowed from the lips of our Aryan ancestors 
in some far-off region in the misty long ago than they 
are to-day as they appear in new type on the pages of 
a new magazine in new America. 

In one sense they are as old as time itself, as old 
as that "childish wonder which is the first step in 
human wisdom**; in another, we may be tempted to 
call them modern, for the earliest collections in any 
of the tongues of the Occident were made one hun- 
dred years after Montaigne, whom Lowell calls our 
first modern writer, and a century and a half later 
than the latest date commonly assigned as the begin- 
ning of modern history. In the true meaning of 
the word, however, the fairy tale can no more be con- 
sidered modern than the coming of the dawn or the 
falling of the dusk, though renewed each day. may 
be considered modern instances. Like these phenom- 



92 THE MESSAGE OE FROEBEL. 

eua of nature, fairy tales have been since time began. 
for the first naked savage no sooner rose above the 
stage of mere brute existence, no sooner looked with 
wonder on the world about him, than he endowed with 
life the objects of that world, supposing, as he could 
not but suppose, that their workings were due to an 
inward volition of which he was conscious in himself. 
He saw in the great white clouds, cows with swelling 
udders, driven to the milking by the wind-god; in 
the sun a yellow-haired divinity, wedding at even-tide 
the violet light which he had forsaken in the morn- 
ing ; in the moon a horned huntress coursing through 
the blue sea of air, and in the lightning a fiery serpent 
whose bite was fatal and whose hissing as he fell 
savagely upon the earth was the rolling of the thunder. 
Robert Browning, in contemplating the childhood 
of the world, says in "Paracelsus," 

" Alan, once descried, imprints forever 

His presence on all lifeless things; the winds 

Are henceforth voices, wailing or a shout, 

A querulous mutter or a quick gay laugh, 

Never a senseless gust now man is born. 

The herded pines commune and have deep thoughts * * 

The peerless cup afloat 
Of the lake-lily is an urn, some Nymph 
Swims bearing high above her head." 

These myths, as they first became current, were 
doubtless felt to be neither poetic nor fanciful, but 
were merely considered to be satisfactory explana- 
tions of familiar phenomena, quite as acceptable as our 



OUR NURSERY TALES. 93 

modern scientific theories on the eclipse of the sun, or 
the rising and falling of the tick's. 

One well-devised and wonder-satisfying myth 
speedily became the parent of countless myth-chil- 
dren and these again, as time flew on, produced in their 
kind until the world is peopled with their progeny, 
and history, science, art, literature, and common speech 
all palpitate with their presence. 

We need not here attempt to recite the arguments 
on that great mooted question, whether the body of 
these ancient myths, so startlingly alike among all 
primitive peoples, originated in the same ancestral 
tongue, or whether similarity of conditions in man and 
nature may account for the production of some of 
them at least, in widely distant times and countries. 
We have only here to consider their relation to 
the nursery tales, only here to answer the poet's ques- 
tion 

" Whence these stories, 

Whence these legends and traditions, 

With the odors of the forest, 

With the dew and damp of meadows?" 

It can be proven, undoubtedly, that the classic 
fairy story, the perfect example of its kind, one which, 
like that humble plant we call the "live forever," 
cannot be crushed, or trampled, or weeded, or discour- 
aged out of existence — one which persistently reap- 
pears in all times, all countries, all arts, and all Liter- 
atures — that such a tale is invariably based upon a 
universal myth and that it is as much a part of our 



94 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 

inherited equipment as a belief in a Supreme Power. 
These stories descend to us from a time when there 
was ik no supernatural because it had not vet been 
discovered that there was such a thing as nature/' and 
from days when primitive man felt that close com- 
munity existed between himself and the brute. The 
doctrine of metempsychosis, which is found in some 
shape or other all over the world, implies, as John 
Fiske says, a fundamental identity between the two, 
and who can positively deny that in ages long past 
there might not have been a period when there was 
such a rapprochement, such a similarity of develop- 
ment between man and his brothers "in air and water 
and the silent wood," that he might not have understood 
their language as we, by sympathy and daily inter- 
course, grow to understand the almost inarticulate 
babblings of the infant amongst us? 

Xe less remarkable than the age of these stories is 
their universal spread. Whatever their date or origin, 
they all alike have wings, and as the bird knows his 
nest, they know their resting place in the heart of all 
peoples. It gives one a new sense of the brotherhood 
of man, of the essential oneness of humanity, to find 
that the very same tale which charms its hearers in 
the Arabian desert and the coffee houses of Bagdad, is 
listened to with delight by the Zuhi cliff dwellers, by 
the fur-clad Esquimaux, and by the American-bred 
negroes on our Southern plantations. 

Not only so, but the philologists prove that the 
primitive Aryan, w 'as he took his evening meal of yava 



OUR NUBSEKY TALES. 95 

• and sipped his fermented mead," undoubtedly listened 
to tales of "Cinderella," "Boots/' or the "Master 
Thief," that were absolutely identical in all their main 
features* with those your little daughter takes down to- 
day in their gay covers from her nursery shelves. 

The Orient seems in all times to have been one 
of the richest storehouses of myths, allegories, para- 
bles, apologues, folk stories, and tales of terror and 
wonder. Much of this profusion is due, no doubt, 
to the mental characteristics of Oriental races, and 
much to the tropical climate, which renders possible 
and desirable long hours of serene and contemplative 
leisure in which the art of the story-teller can be per- 
fected. 

The Crusaders unwittingly did literature a great 
service in bringing home from the Orient many of 
these magical tales which were spread abroad by 
preaching friars,— for illustrated sermons seem to have 
been as much the fashion then, as they are among 
revivalists to-day; were repeated by travelers and 
mendicants to secure food and a night's lodging, and 
were recounted, with others of their kind— sagas 
household tales, legend,, and fables— by minstrel, glee- 
man, jester, jongleur, and trouvere. 

In days when there was no literature save what 
could be communicated orally, when every man was 
his own novelist, so to speak, as well as his own maga-! 
zine and newspaper, the profession of story-teller 
mustjiave been one of great delight and profit. The 

♦John Fiske : " Myths and Myth Makers." 



9G THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 

memory, sole and sufficient resource for those who 
have never weakened it by reference to printed word, 
was for many centuries the only library of these 
artists, for the literary faculty seems to have been 
used only in embellishing the form of the tale's, trans- 
posing them from prose to poetry and vice versa, 
and in adding jokes, local hits, or corroborative de- 
tail. 

In the first years of the twelfth century those few 
English story-tellers who were also Latin scholars, 
if there were any such among the humbler folk, might 
reinforce their stock of magical and supernatural lore 
from the Disciplina Clericalis, which was put together 
about that time by Peter Alfonsus, a Spanish Jew. 
It was a wonderful book, partly derived from the 
Talmud, partly from Arabian fables, and partly from 
Sanscrit tales, which had been translated into Persian, 
thence into Arabic, and thence again into Greek. 

Komance had taken root at the court of Henry I. 
at the very beginning of this century, where, under 
Queen Maud's patronage, that "daring fabulist,* 1 
Geoffrey of Monmouth, transcribed, rewrote, and adapt- 
ed old Welsh myths, dreams, and traditions, partly 
from old Latin manuscripts and partly from Breton 
legends, calling the glittering whole a History of the 
Britons. 

More than a century after this the Gesta Roma no - 
rum appeared in England, a curious jumble of classi- 
cal, Oriental, and Gothic fictions, but a wonderful store- 
house for romancers. In its pages Boccaccio found 



OUR NURSERY TALES. 97 

his Two Friends, Grower and Chaucer the History of 
Constance, Shakespeare his Merchant of Venice, and 
in still more modern days Schiller his Fridolin, Par- 
nell his Hermit, and Walpole his Mysterious Mother. 

The great body of story-tellers, however, in what- 
ever land they lived, had for hundreds of years no 
thought of reference to written literature for their 
material, for the mass of myth-descended tales and 
romances was at the command of all who having ears 
could hear and having tongues could speak. 

When we begin to consider these stories as the 
art of printing has fixed them in permanent form, we 
are amazed at the fidelity with which their inner 
meaning and spiritual content have been preserved 
from age to age. Even the clothing of the tale lias 
frequently been retained, the story-teller often using 
certain old-time words here and there, which had no 
longer any meaning either to him or to his hearers, but 
were repeated mechanically as somehow or other, — no 
one knew how, — an essential part of the narrative. 

The oldest known manuscript of the Arabian 
Nights is comparatively modern, dating from 1548, 
and it is supposed to have been collected in its present 
form, only a century earlier, the work being done in 
Egypt in 1450. 

Whatever books the English mariners, Sebastian 
Cabot and his crew, may have brought with them on 
their various voyages to this Western Hemisphere, t hex- 
could not have been fairy or household tales, for those 
contained in the Disciplina Clericalis and the 



98 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 

Gesta Romanorum were respectively two and three 
centuries old. and quite out of the ken of simple 
mariners, and the modern collections had not yet 
been made. 

America had been discovered nearly a century and 
a half, the bones of Cabot and Columbus too, all were 
dust and their good swords rust, and Shakespeare, the 
great fairy lover, had been dead for twenty years, when 
modern fairy talcs may be said to have had their liter- 
ary birth in the publication by a gay Italian signor, 
II Cavalier Giambattista Basile, Conte di Torrone and 
Conte Palatine, of a delightful collection called II 
Pentamerone. It was written in Neapolitan patois, 
though the various tales are supposed to have been 
gathered in Crete and in Venice, but they are in essen- 
tials exactly what have always been told as nursery 
tales in all times and all countries, and our old 
friends, the myth-makers, are answerable for every one 
of them. 

It should be understood of course that the term 
fairy as here employed is not confined to narratives 
in which elves or spirits actually appear, but is taken 
as Chancer used it, to cover tales in which there is 
something faerie, that is. something enchanted or 
extraordinary, whether it be fays, giants, dwarf's, 
speaking animals, or indeed human beings of remark- 
able wit or stupidity. 

Basile obviously had no notion of the philological 
or mythological value of ins collection, or he could 
never have been so gay and witty, as he tells of The 



OUR NURSERY TALES. 99 

Months, The Throe Enchanted Princes, Pernonto and 
the Fairy Wishes, Vardillo's Stupidity. Cenerentola, 
and The Enchanted Doe 

"The Dawn." he says at the beginning of one of his 
tales, "had gone forth to grease the wheels of the Sun's 
chariot and with the fatigne of stirring the fat into the 
wheelbox with a stick, had grown as red as a rosy 
apple." Here is modernism for you, assuredly. 
And again, as a moral to one of the tales, •'He who does 
not bait the hook of the affections with courtesy never 
catches the fish of kindness." 

The taste of the times in regard to proprieties and 
improprieties of allusion is sufficiently evident in the 
Pentamerone to render it inadvisable reading for chil- 
dren, but the, Cavalier evidently set everything down 
with a light heart and sang as he wrote. 

Sixty years later than Basile, only two centuries 
ago now, comes dear Charles Perrault, commonly e<>n- 
sidered the literary parent of the fairy tale. A con- 
temporary of Boileau and Moliere and Bossuet, his 
fame in his own line is as bright as theirs and if. as 
somebody says, we can judge of a work by the quantity 
and quality of things which it teaches and inspires, we 
may easily say that the Contes de Perrault have at- 
tained the highest mark in their line, lie also wrote 
with perfect unconsciousness it seems, and repeated his 
narratives as he heard them from grandams and grand- 
sires, old nurses and simple ountry folk. Me says of 
them himself that "they lack sense and are therefore 
designed for children that have little sense as yet." 



v*. Of V. 



100 THE .MESSAGE OF PROEBEL. 

and he does not dream of their immense age, or their 
great ethical value. Xo one doubtless would have 
been more astonished than Perranlt if he had been 
told that he was dealing with fragments of ancient 
religions, with sun-myths and cloud-myths and that 
several of his tales could be found bodily in the 
Mahabharata and the Panchatantra. It is said of the 
C antes that they are incomparably the most ingenuous 
and charming of all the collections, which, if true, may 
be due to the fact that they were all told by the 
author and his friends to the children of the family 
around the fireside in the evening, and, being often 
repeated as dictation exercises next morning, undoubt- 
edly received the benefit of many suggestions from a 
bevy of competent, if youthful, critics. 

A I'vw years after Perrault's collection appeared 
(1704) came the translation of the Arabian Xights 
into French, and then Gozzi, the rival of Goldoni 
( 1722), rose upon the romantic horizon with the in- 
troduction of those fairy dramas which had such an 
astounding run for several years in Italy. L' Angellino 
lid rcnlc. II Re Corvo, Turandot are completely for- 
gotten now, but they were remarkable and beautiful 
productions in their time and exercised a marked in- 
fluence upon succeeding literature. 

Dean Swift published Gulliver's Travels thirty 
years after Perrault's Contes appeared, but they are 
scarcely to he classed as fairy-tales, perhaps, though 
the touch of the myth-maker is visible upon them. 



OUR NURSERY TALES. 101 

and are rather humorous extravaganzas based on the 
impossible stories of travelers in the Middle Ages. 

The nineteenth century was about to open when 
Tieck wrote his Folk Tales and Phantasus, partly 
original these and partly drawn from an inexhaustible 
source, the memories of a race of child-lovers and child 
interpreters, who in their simplicity had kept close 
to Nature's heart. He was closely followed by the 
Grimm brothers, who, while Great Britain and Amer- 
ica were fighting the War of 1812, were collecting their 
wonderful treasures of fairy lore from the German 
peasants, many of them from the wife of a cowherd 
near Cassel. With the advent of these books fairy 
tales became the subject of scientific thought and 
study and the earlier collections came to be regarded 
in their true light. 

Perhaps the best teller of fairy stories in the 
literary sense that the world has ever seen was Hans 
Christian Andersen, but his volumes contain more of 
himself and less of myth and tradition than other 
collections, and the tales are ethereal, symbolic, ex- 
quisitely poetic and distinctly touched with the later 
modern feeling. The ubiquitous myth-maker, who 
will not be left out of literature, is responsible for 
some of them, witness the story of the Wild Swans, hut 
in The Ugly Duckling, The Flax, The Little Match 
Girl and their fellows, the literary artist with a con- 
scious purpose is supreme. 

Serious, practical, sober-minded England, who had 
been colonizing and fighting and trading while her 



102 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 

neighbors were collecting fairy tales, came to the 
front in 1838 with the first complete translation of the 
Mabinogion, that great Welsh storehouse of the ro- 
mantic and the supernatural, but it must not be 
thought because there had been no notable collections 
in England, thai the people and the authors thereof 
were ignorant of fairy-lore. English literature is a 
Living witness to the great extent of that knowledge, 
and Thomas the Rhymer, as early as the thirteenth 
century, wrote an enchanting description of that Queen 
of Faery, whose love he was so fortunate as to win. 

That purely English fairy tales once existed in 
tolerable numbers there are evidences in the celebrated 
library list of Captain Cox, among others, and in odd 
references in literature and in chap-books, but they 
were routed by the superior elegance of Perraulfs tales 
when these appeared, and sought refuge in remote 
country regions. 

There are certain indications that the common 
form of the English fairy tale was the cante-fab/c, a 
mixture of prose and verse of which the most illus- 
trious example in literature is Aucassin and Xicolete. 

Mr. Joseph Jacobs, an authority in folklore, has 
lately collected two volumes of these early English 
narratives, and thus viewed, in mass, they are seen to 
be remarkably vigorous, dramatic, and humorous. The 
story of Tom Tit Tot is unequaled in its line, Mr. 
Fox, breathlessly exciting, and The Well of the World's 
End, a striking and poetic rendering of a familiar 
t heme. 



OUR 3STURSERY TALES. 1U3 

If English children were nurtured on such narra- 
tives it is no wonder that the first English translation 
( from the original) of the Arabian Nights, in 1840, 
was received with such applause, for the seed fell on 
ground already well prepared for the sowing. 

The Ettrick Shepherd gives us a delightful account 
of the origin of fairy-folk in Britain. 

The Knight of Dunblane, he says, a certain gentle- 
man of honor and repute, met on the hills one day 
while hunting, a golden-haired dam-el. more beautiful 
than his eyes had ever seen before. He lost no time 
in making love to her and she responded with equal 
impetuosity, the outcome of the affair being her eon- 
sent to be his bride, whereupon, his word given, she 
spirited him away with her to Fairyland. 

For twelve months and a day he remained in the 
enchanted underground halls, surrounded by every 
luxury, but hearing no voice and seeing no face but 
that of his bride, who came to him each evening in 
fresh attire and fairer than the moon on a clear 
night. 

At the fin} of the year, when the fay was about 
to become a mother, she apparently grew exceedingly 
anxious as to the future of the expected babe, on ac- 
count of the racial difference between its parents, and 
so wearied the Knight with her plaints that one day 
he pettishly exclaimed that he wished he were at home 
again. 

To wish is to have, you know, in Fairyland, and on 
the instant he was transported to the doors of his castle, 



10 J: THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 

where at first no one knew him and even his dogs 
refused to come at his call. He was indeed greatly 
changed, and as days went by grew pale and wistful, 
took no interest in things of earth and longed un- 
ceasingly for his bride. At last one day, a lovely lady 
appeared leading a beautiful child by either hand and 
at once the Knight welcomed her as his fairy bride, 
having no need of the love-tokens she showed to con- 
vince him of her identity and gladly acknowledging 
the twin-chilclren as his own. He was still in trans- 
ports of joy when a second fair lady and other twins 
appeared and upon her heels still another dame, until 
seven resplendent beings attended by fourteen infants 
were assembled in the room, each one producing ir- 
refutable testimony that she was the rightful wife. 

Upon this scene of confusion the Knight's old 
mother entered and by a few simple spells proved that 
the brides were the Seven Weird Sisters doomed to 
remain under enchantment until some gallant cavalier 
should wed them all. 

They one and all disappeared at the sign of the 
cross made by the old mother, considerately leaving the 
fourteen children behind them lest their father be 
lonely, and chanting as they vanished this last in- 
junction : — 

"Sweet babes, adieu ! and may you never rue 
The mingled existence we leave to you. 
There is part of virtue and part of blame, 
Part of spirit and part of flame, 
Part of body and passion fell, 
Part of heaven and part of hell. 



OUR NURSERY TALES. 105 

You are babies of beauty and babies of wonder. 
But fly from the cloud of the lightning and thunder, 
And keep by the moonbeam or twilight gray. 
For you never were made for the light of day. 
Long may you amid your offspring dwell, — 
Babies of beauty, kiss and farewell!" 

The Knight of Dunblane, it is- reported, never 
afterward uttered a word, which is not surprising, con- 
sidering the shock his system must have received, but 
moved about for a time like a spirit in pain and then 
vanished from mortal sight. 

It is said that he was eventually made the Patri- 
arch King of the Scottish Fays, but however that may 
be, his progeny seem to have made themselves entirely 
at home on British soil, apparently preferring their 
father to their mother land. 

An interesting thing to be noted in connection with 
fairv beings is that they seem to decrease in size with 
the progress of civilization. The old myth-makers, 
weaving their mighty fancies on the mighty forces 
of the universe, attributed no personality or physical 
presence to these forces, and it was only as they de- 
generated into gods and demons and thence into mag- 
ical beings of various orders, gifted with beneficent 
and malevolent powers, that they began to appear as 
flower-folk, as elves, sprites, brownies, trolls, pixies, 
and other creatures of diminutive size. They appear 
to be markedly influenced by political changes also, for 
their scarcity in modern France is accounted for by 
the story that, terrified by the thunders of the Revolu- 
tion, they left the country in a body, first assembling in 



106 THE MESSAGE OF FKOEBEL. 

grateful concourse around the tomb of Perrault, upon 
whose manes they conferred the boon of immortality. 
We doubt not that they then followed the example 
of other illustrious fugitives and took refuge in 
England, the home of the exile, for no one race of 
home-bred fairy-folk could have existed under as 
many names as English speech has for them to-day. 

These same Protean and magic creatures appear to 
be extremely adaptable in religious matters, embrac- 
ing Christianity and serving as decorous godfathers 
and godmothers, if occasion requires, or riding broom- 
sticks, weaving horrid spells and dancing at the revels 
of demon worshipers, if they so elect. On the 
whole it may be said that they are, as a race, but im- 
perfectly inoculated with religious ideas as yet, and 
since the possession of a soul seems to be an object 
of aspiration with some of them at least, it may be 
that a modern mission to the fairies would be crowned 
with encouraging success. 

Their dispositions seem to be easily affected, which. 
perhaps, makes the case somewhat more hopeful, in one 
light at least, for an Irishman of to-day complains 
that the Scots have had a baleful influence on the 
ghost and fairy temperament, making it both "dour 
and dowie.*' 

Leaving the wee folk themselves and returning to 
their legends again, we find that in all times and 
countries they deal with the following subjects: Fairy 
Births, Changelings. Robberies from Fairyland, Super- 
natural Lapses of Time in that Country. Bird Maidens. 



OUR NURSERY TALES. 107 

Invisible Caps and Cloaks. Shoes of Swiftness, Magical 
Captures and Rescues, Inexhaustible Purses, Gold- 
Producing Animals, Dragons and Monstrous Birds, 
Sub-Aqueous Fairy Halls, Forbidden Rooms, Magic 
Words, Impossible Tasks, Cupid and Psyche Legends, 
Fairy Hinds. Magic Boats, Life Depending on some 
Extraneous Object, Enchanted Horses, Demons in 
Bottles, Contracts with the Evil One, Three Wishes, 
Ring- and Fish Legends, Men Swallowed by Monster 
Fish, Magical Transformations, Thankful Beasts, and 
Secrets Learned from Birds. 

Stories dealing with these last two topics, with 
beasts gifted with human speech and human intellect, 
capable even of assuming human form sometimes, and 
their relations with man are very ancient, as has been 
shown, and are always classed with fairy tales; though 
they seem, in some respects, hardly to belong to them. 
They are called specifically "household tales," though 
the name labels rather than defines them and they form 
a separate branch of the great mass of folklore, one 
in which that view of the animal kingdom shown 
by Totemism is distinctly traceable. 

Still another class of folk-tales common to all 
times and countries is the "cumulative story.** such as 
"The House that .lack Built/' or "The Old Woman 
and her Crooked Sixpence." This latter narrative is, 
in fact, an almost literal translation of a mystical 
hymn in the "Sepher Haggadah" of the Talmud, and 
is an interesting example of the hoary old age of some 
of our modern nursery favorites. 



108 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 

When we begin to study the subject we are sur- 
prised to note how many of our English writers, em- 
inent in other lines of literature, from Chaucer and 
Spenser, Milton and Shakespeare, down to the present 
time, have written, collected, and edited plays, poems, 
and stories devoted to the world of faerie. To give only 
the most ordinary and well-known examples of yester- 
day and to-day, there are the Kingsleys, Charles and 
Henry, with their Water Babies and Boy in Grey; 
Lewis Carroll with his famous Alice books; Andrew 
Lang with his Rainbow series ; George Macdonald and 
his Back of the North Wind ; J can Ingelow and Mopsa 
the Fairy; Hawthorne and his Wonder Book and 
Tanglewood Tales; Drake and his Culprit Fay; Laf- 
cadio Hcarn and Stray Leaves from Strange Litera- 
tures, and Stevenson and the Bottle Imp, The Isle of 
Voices, Will CT the Mill, Thrawn Janet, Markheim 
and several of the fables, which are not fables at all 
in the strict sense of the word. We may add to the 
illustrious roll, Dickens, Thackeray, Lowell, Tennyson, 
Eobert Browning, Charles Lamb, George Sand, Char- 
lotte Bronte, Miss Yonge, William Morris, most of 
whose longer poems are based on faerie subjects, Miss 
Mulock, Sir Richard Burton, Longfellow, Ruskin, 
George Meredith, Quiller-Couch, Frank Stockton, W. 
D. Howells, James Whitcomb Riley, Joel Chandler 
Harris and Rudyard Kipling. 

As soon as we begin to attempt a classification of 
these productions we see at once the entirely new 
element which has entered into the fairy tale of to- 



OUR NURSERY TALES. 109 

day and the complete departure of some of them 
from the old traditions. 

This new element makes no part of the various 
modern collections, which are merely the old favorites 
clad in new garments, nor of the classic myths retold, 
which are so fashionable just now ; nor does it show its 
face in the nursery tales recently gathered in strange 
countries and among strange peoples, the Zulus, the 
Zuhis, the Esquimaux, the Persians, Arabians, Chinese 
and Japanese, and the folk of the Deccan. These are 
all hoary with antiquity, all bear a family likeness 
to one another and to our own primitive fireside tales 
and would be welcomed as at least distant cousins 
wherever met. 

Lewis Carroll's books, on the contrary, represent 
a distinct new class, a class of freakish adventures, 
topsy-turvy conditions and general upsidedownness. 
The chief joy of these stories is the delicious unex- 
pectedness of everything — the pleasure, for instance, of 
hunting an impossible beast, under impossible circum- 
stances, with impossible weapons through an in)]><>s>il>l,> 
journey and finding out at the end that he was some- 
thing else after all and even that something else has 
escaped us. 

This is grotesqueness certainly, and grotesqueness 
is nothing new in the branch of literature we are 
discussing, but the marked point of difference is thai 
Lewis Carroll, as a product of modern times, is gro- 
tesque on purpose, and here he is a sworn brother of 
Frank Stockton's, who exploits the grotesque as sue- 



110 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 

cessfully in his fairy tales as in his stories for mature 
readers. 

This is the great distinction, perhaps, that might- 
be made between the fairy stories of the last half cen- 
tury and their predecessors — that they are now com- 
monly written with a conscious purpose to serye as a 
vehicle for instruction, for satire, be it bitter or play- 
ful, for argument, or for .furtherance of political 
views. Such are the fairy tales of the Kingsleys, 
M.icdonald, Dickens, Thackeray, Lamb, and Howells, 
to give a few conspicuous examples, and such also is 
an exquisite little book, The Elf Errant, published 
lately by Moira O'Neill. Then there are the pure- 
ly sportive narratives, like Anstey's Tinted Venus, and' 
Vice Versa, which toss about the old fairy-tale conven- 
tions like shuttle-cocks and laugh as they see them 
flying through the air, and the eccentric variety, 
resembling the Beardsley illustrations in their dis- 
tortion of possibilities. These are decidedly decadent 
in general tone, ephemeral in their make-up and 
really give no more lasting pleasure to the children 
for whom they are written, than the clown does when 
he puts his head between his legs and grins at the 
audience upside down. 

Many of the recent fairy tales, exclusive of this last 
variety, arc witty, tender, graceful, amusing — serious 
and thoughtful, too, sometimes; but the blight of 
modernism has fallen upon them; they no longer 
believe in themselves, and hence their deep indwelling 
charm has vanished. 



OUR NURSERY TALES. Ill 

There have been also of late years a number of 
old "motives" in fairy lore worked up into new com- 
positions with modern backgrounds, and these have 
been humorous and decidedly successful among chil- 
dren, a good example being Chris and the Wonderful 
Lamp, an Aladdin-up-to-date production, which won 
much youthful applause in the St. Nicholas lately. 

Perhaps Mr. Palmer Cox's "Brownies" may be 
counted under this head, unless, indeed, from their 
astounding and phenomenal success they merit a sepa- 
rate compartment by themselves. There was a time 
when juvenile literature was overrun by a Tartar 
horde of Brownies, and all other fays, elves, sprites, 
and hobgoblins hid their heads in caves and lonely 
forests. 

Nor is the invasion over; new Brownie adventures 
are still being published and witnesses to the mighty 
power of the race are to be seen in Brownie plays, 
Brownie cards and note-paper, Brownie caps and 
dresses, Brownie dolls, Brownie candy, Brownie pins, 
paperweights, penwipers, and pincushions. 

For several years the old hymn was altogether 
superseded and children refused to sing anything but 

"I want to he a Brownie 
And with the Brownies stand," 

and yet these little beings seem ultra-modern in 
costume and bearing to the true fairy-lover and eon- 
descend, in his opinion, far too much to present con- 
ditions in their favorite sports and enterprises. 



112 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 

Among our recent revealers of fairy treasure, of 
myth and legend, outside of the collectors of nursery 
tales in all nations, Howard Pyle merits especial men- 
tion, perhaps, for the originality of his tales, their 
graceful composition, their inherent interest, the dex- 
terous way in which ancient and modern have been 
blended in them, and the old-world atmosphere which 
wraps them round. 

George Meredith's Shaving of Shagpat is said by 
an English critic, Mr. Alfred Nutt, to be the only one 
of the modern, consciously invented fairy tales which 
conforms fully to the folk-tale conventions. 

It is not a child's story, of course, but the critic 
is right in saying that it follows the ancient formulae 
as closely and accurately as the best of Grimm's or of 
Campbell's tales. 

"To divine the nature of a convention and to use 
its capabilities to the utmost is a special mark of 
genius/' says Mr. Xutt, and the observation brings us 
naturally to Eudyard Kipling's Jungle Stories, the 
great achievement of recent literature in this line. 
Overtopping all other books of the kind as the century 
plant overtops the geranium, they show the mighty 
power of genius which can deal with subjects eternally 
old, and with a touch of the finger make them eternally 
new. 

There have been many well-authenticated cases of 
native children in India, suckled by wolves and spend- 
ing years in a wild life but little different from that 
of the savage creatures among which they found refuge. 



OUR NURSERY TALES. 113 

Xot only may such a case be true to Fad. though that is 
of slight importance, but it is true to spirit also; there 
is a deep meaning in it which the old myth-makers 
universally felt and utilized and which Emerson voices 
in his poem on "Power." 

"Cast the bantling on the rocks. 

Suckle him with the she-wolfs teat, 
Wintered with the hawk and fox, 

Power and speed be hands and feet." 

"Mowgli" has many predecessors in the realm of 
myth, legend, and folk-tale, and his attendant animals 
many brothers in the household stories of all nations, 
but herein lies one great power of their lives and 
adventures, that they are built on foundations rock- 
ribbed like the hills and ancient as the sun. 

It is evident enough that Mr. Kipling, as a child 
in India, was nurtured on these animal tales, ami it 
is probable that with his tremendous receptive power 
he absorbed the whole literary stock in trade of many 
a dusky native, but that does not account for the 
Jungle Stories any more than carbon accounts for 
the luster of the diamond, or than hydrogen and oxy- 
gen in specific quantities account for the sparkle in 
the fountain. It is the old myth over again. The 
treasures are ever waiting, but the door of the cave 
will not open till the hero says the magic word. 

The beasts of Mr. Kipling's jungle live as no ani- 
mals have ever lived before in literature, though his 
life-giving power and his wide and tender sympathy 



Ill THE MESSAGE OF FKOEBEL. 

with the brute creation were shown us long ago in 
Her Majesty's Servants, My Lord, The Elephant and 
The Maltese Cat. Up to Mr. Kipling's time the beasts 
of fable and folk-tale were but skins stuffed with 
straw ; now they live and move and have their being, 
for the gods have breathed into their nostrils. 

It is in their relations with Mowgli that the 
wolves, the tiger, the python, the monkeys, stand out 
most boldly, and this is always so in the household 
tale, — man and the brute must be contrasted, must 
be set over against each other that the characters of 
both may appear more strongly. 

Although Mr. Kipling's achievements may be said 
to be ours because he is of our race and language, yet 
we have a writer nearer home, a tale-teller of the 
domestic jungle, of whom we have great reason to be 
proud. Mr. Joel Chandler Harris' Uncle Eemus Sto- 
ries are as valuable to literature as Mr. Kipling's in 
that they are of a distinct, new kind, and told with 
consummate grace and art; and as valuable to the 
student of folklore because they show the universal 
elements of the tales of all nations, preserved in this 
case and brought to this country by the native African. 
Mr. Harris' animals are wonderfully lifelike and con- 
vincing, but though they more abound in humor they 
are commonly somewhat less serious, purposeful, and 
dramatic than the beasts of the Indian jungle. 

There are exceptions to this statement, however, 
and one is the Black Stallion's story of his wonderful 
midnight gallop to save the Yankee schoolmaster from 



OUR NURSERY TALES. 115 

lynchers, which is full to the brim of dramatic fire and 
thrills you with every heat of his hoofs and every pant- 
ing breath he draws. 

Both jungle writers are absolutely spontaneous and 
are evidently so carried along by the vivid interest of 
their subjects that they believe for the time in every 
word they say and therefore fill the reader with a 
similar conviction. 

One of Mr. Harris* latest characters ""Aaron, the 
Arab Slave," tells us that he who has been "touched/ 1 
that is, he who has had the sign of the double cross 
made on the inner side of his left thumb, knows the 
language of all animals, and we arc sure at once that 
both Mr. Harris* nurse and Mr. Kipling's performed 
the mystic rite upon their charges in early infancy.* 

Another most valuable contribution to American 
literature is Mr. Charles Lummis* collection of Pueblo 
folk-tales, entitled The Man Who Married the Moon. 
There is an Antelope boy in this book who is a near 
relative of Mowgli on the foster mother's side and a 
Coyote whose ancestors certainly knew "'Brer Rabbit" 
and "Brer Fox." The stories are full of quiet humor, 
full, too, of tenderness, insight, and wisdom, and are 
altogether so superior to some of the nursery tales of 
other countries that we feel an added interest in the 
peopLe who have preserved and transmitted them. 
When we consider the Zuni Tales and the Uncle Remus 
Stories we can but feel that the African essayist was 
partially right at least, who lately wrote in relation to 
the contribution of his people to our civilization: "A1- 



1 16 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 

ready we come not empty handed, there is to-day no 
true American music but the sweet wild melodies of 
the negro slave ; the American fairy tales are Indian 
and African, we are the sole oasis of simple faith and 
reverence in a desert of dollars and smartness/'* 

It was lately remarked in one of our leading literary 
periodicals that there are now a large and increasing 
number of children who find no pleasure in fairy 
tales, but rather delight in the records of actual 
occurrences. The statement was not supported by any 
proofs, however, and was possibly a hasty generaliza- 
tion made by a writer, who, condemned to wearing 
blue glasses himself, saw the whole world of the same 
dull hue. 

It has always been true that fairy tales failed to 
appeal to a few exceptional children and doubtless 
even in the time of the myth-makers, hard-headed and 
scornful savages existed who said naught but "Pshaw !" 
when told that the Sun and the Dawn-maiden were 
lovers and pooh-poohed the theory that the mountains 
were the mouldering bones of a mighty Jotiin, the 
stars golden missiles useful for stoning the devil. 

So sweeping an assertion as that of a general decay 
of childish interest in fairy tales would require proof 
by scientific investigation, for in the very nature 
of things it would appear impossible that it should be 
true. To one who holds in any degree to the theory 



*W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, Atlantic Monthly, August, 
1897. 



OUR NURSERY TALES. 117 

of parallelism of development between the child and 
the race, it seems clear that these talcs which were 
"conceived by primitive men as concrete examples of 
general truths must naturally be received with joy 
by children who are in a corresponding stage of de- 
velopment.'' 

It may be that the small persons of to-day, who 
are somewhat imbued from birth with the scientific 
spirit, linger a shorter time in the realm of the 
fairies than did their ancestors, but some term of resi- 
dence there seems to be fundamentally necessary to 
development. To shut the child away from myth 
and fairy tale is, as Lowell says in regard to poetry, 
"to close up the windows of nature on the emotional 
and imaginative sides," and from such a course dis- 
aster must inevitably come. 

The poets have long whimsically protested against 
the too early inoculation of children with the scientific 
virus and there are those who contend that the practice 
involves a distinct element of danger to the growing 
mind and soul. There is a story of Tennyson and 
one of his nephews which is doubtless mythical, but 
is worth quoting as illustrative of the poetic point 
of view. The conversation on a certain occasion, it 
seems, turned on education and the spread of scientific 
knowledge. "Yes/' said the Laureate, "it is spreading, 
and it is crushing all the romance and poetry out of 
children's lives. It was only yesterday I was walking 
in the fields with one of my nephews, a little chap of 
eight or ten. when we came to a fairy ring. 'Look,' 



118 THE MESSAGE OF FEOEBEL. 

I said ; 'look here, my boy, here 's a fairy ring.' C A 
what, uncle? 5 he asked, in a surprised sort of way. 

'"Why, a fairy ring, my lad/ I said. f The wee 
good folk must have been dancing here last night, 
and this is the mark of their feet on the sward.' 'Oh, 
Uncle Alfred,* he replied quite gravely, "it is well 
known that those fairy rings, as you call them, are 
caused by a species of fungus." " 

Sucli a little prig. as this would he the despair of 
any right-minded mother, and we can but think him 
a lusus mi I unic, or one of those exceptions required 
to prove a rule. 

One can but wonder if the parents, and there are 
such, who entirely disapprove of fairy tales for chil- 
dren, have given the subject careful thought, and 
realize how the ideal representatives of this branch of 
literature in their simple humor, their ingenuous views 
of all* things, their poetic subject-matter, their dis- 
closure of constancy, generosity, fidelity and purity in 
man and beast, their scorn of definite time and place, 
their youthful way of seeing and feeling, how abso- 
lutely suited these are to childhood and how admirably 
adapted to developing the imagination as well as to 
introducing the young human creature into universal 
human conditions. The recounting of actual occur- 
rences, a- suggested by the critic already quoted, though 
most valuable at a later stage of development, cannot 
serve the purpose of the folk story in early years, and 
neither can the fairy tales of science, so-called. This 
term, by the way, is a complete misnomer, for they are 



OUR NURSERY TALES. 119 

as far removed from the primitive nursery tale as 
the east is from the west, originating in a differenl 

stage of the world's progress, suited to a different 
age and serving different purposes in the cultivation of 
mind and soul. One is no more to be substituted for 
the other than night for day, though both are useful 
in their turn. We may indeed call them wonder sto- 
ries and reverence their power of leading the soul 
from nature up to nature's God, but fairy tales they 
are not and can never be. 

If we tell fairy stories at all then, let us tell "truly" 
ones, as the children say, and decline to countenance 
those mummers of modern literature who hold the 
lesson book under their gay clothing and whack the 
unsuspecting child with it when safe occasion offers 
itself. Let us have, too, not only a "truly" fairv tale, 
but one which remains such to the end, for there is 
nothing so insulting to the youthful imagination as 
that clumsy, makeshift narrative which closes by say- 
ing, "And then little John, or little Jane, as the case 
may be, awakened and found it was all a dream.'* 

We need not, of necessity, although warm in our 
convictions, be such devotees of the fairy tale as to 
clamor for it for ourselves and for our children first, 
last and all the time, but we may well claim for it the 
same place in daily life that we claim for poetry. 

The soul needs food as well as the body, indeed 
it needs more and better food, for one is the germ of 
life, the other but the husk which envelops it. The 
imagination must he ministered unto, and it is idle 



120 THE MESSAGE OF FKOEBEL. 

to suppose that it will content itself altogether with 
the practical, the instructive, the didactic. 

"In a last analysis," wrote Mr. Lowell, " it may 
be said that it is to the sense of wonder that all 
literature of the fancy and of the imagination appeals, 
and if this sense is the survival in us of some savage 
ancestor of the age of flint, we may well be thankful 
to him for his longevity, or his transmitted nature, 
whichever it may be." 

The whole Romantic movement in literature, when- 
ever and wherever it has appeared, appeals to this 
same ancestor and his sense of wonder, and that good 
red blood of his runs in our veins to-day as hotly as 
it did in the veins of our fathers, and thrills at the 
same magic touch. 

"Romance is dead, say some; but I say no!" 

"God keep my youth and love alive, that I 
May wonder at this world until I die; 

Let sea and mountain speak to me, that so 
Waking or sleeping, I may fight the lie; 

Romance is dead, say some; but I say no!" 



NOV 15 1900 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



019 840 056 7 



